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Some Unsetting Lights of 
English Literature 



WASHINGTON 

Never seduced by show of present good 
By other than unsetting lights to steer. 

— Lowe//. 



Arranged and Edited by 
J. J. BURNS/ A. M., Ph. D. 



CHICAGO 

AINSWORTH 6- COMPANY 
1903 



tA 



^' 



^THi LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Comes Received 

DEC." 22 !9®2 

0LA86 (t XXa No. 

14. t> <? 2> 

OOFY B. 



Copyright, 1902, 
Ainsworth & Company 



Contents 



Page 

Introduction ....... v 

Lord Byron, with Portrait .... 3 
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos III and IV 

[Abridged] 7 

Dr. Samuel Johnson^ with Portrait . . -65 

A Journey to the Hebrides [Abridged], with map 69 

Samuel T. Coleridge, with Portrait . . 171 

Christabel ....... 173 

The Picture . . . . . . .199 

Charles James Fox, with Portrait . . 207 

Napoleon's Overtures for Peace . . . 211 

Robert Browning, with Portrait . . . 261 

Saul ........ 263 

Charles Lamb, with Portrait . f . . 287 
Five Essays of Elia : 

The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple . . 289 

A Quakers' Meeting .... 303 
Grace before Meat . . . . .310 

Dream Children; A Revery . . . 320 

New Year's Eve ...... 325 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, with Portrait . . 333 

Adonais ........ 335 

Edmund Burke, with Portrait . . . 357 

A Letter to a Noble Lord .... 359 



iv CONTENTS 

John Milton, with Portrait . . . • . 421 

Lycidas ........ 425 

Walter Savage Landor, with Portrait . 435 

Imaginary Conversations : 

Southey and Porson ..... 439 

John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent . . 446 

Leofric and Godiva . . . . .452 

Diogenes and Plato . . . . . 459 

General Lacy and Cura Merino . . .477 

William Wordsworth, with Portrait . . 501 

Ode on Immortality . . . . 505 



Introduction 



" The riches of scholarship, the benignities of liter- 
ature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are 
beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they can- 
not be inherited, so they cannot be alienated. But they 
may be shared. . . . 

" Have you ever rightly considered what the mere 
ability to read means ? That it enables us to see with the 
keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the 
sweetest voices of all time? . . . 

" Every book we read may be made a round in the 
ever-lengthening ladder by which we climb to knowledge, 
and to that temperance and serenity of mind which, as 
it is the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the sweetest. 
But this can only be if we read such books as make 
us think, and read them in such a way as helps them to 
do so; that is, by endeavoring to judge them, and thus 
to make them an exercise rather than a relaxation of 
the mind." — ■ Lowell's Books and Libraries. 

The purpose held steadily in view during the selec- 
tion and preparation of the contents of this book was to 
put into one handy volume some of the excellent works 
of literature. 

The book is now sent out with the belief that it may 
please the taste and meet the needs of a portion of that 
large body somewhat indefinitely described as " the gen- 
eral reader," also be welcomed by avowed students of 
literature. 



vi INTRODUCTION 

No one of Shakespeare's dramas is contained herein, 
as they are almost everywhere at hand in editions with- 
out number, and while these mighty works are read, other 
unsetting lights should not go unread. 

Milton, the second of our poets, and one of the four 
greatest epic poets of the world, is drawn upon for but 
one of his minor poems, a bit of perfection in its kind, 
to aid the study of another great elegy, different in style 
and much more difficult. Reuben Post Halleck says : 
" Adonais stands second in the language among elegiac 
poems, Lycidas, of course, coming first." 

With only a short step over the boundaries of truth 
the other writers may be said to be contemporaries, and 
surely were of the " choice and master spirits of their 
age." 

Childe Harold, as here presented, is the best half of 
the best half of Byron's masterpiece. As the whole work 
is rather a series of episodes, or of poems, it readily 
yields itself to the ungrateful but sometimes imperative 
process of shortening. 

It is not a rational possibility that one should take a 
Journey, though it be only a fireside travel, with Dr. 
Johnson across Scotland from Edinburgh to the western 
coast, over to Skye, Raasay, Col, Mull, Iona, and not 
enjoy the sight of hundreds of quaint and curious things 
in a part of the world which to most readers will be 
virgin soil. Besides, there is the rare opportunity of 
being present when these objects, animate and inanimate, 
strike the mind of one of history's most noted men, and 
of hearing him discourse upon them. It will be like 
" lunching with Plutarch," even if Plato does not join 
the company at supper. As in Childe Harold, so here, 



INTRODUCTION vii 

the editor felt compelled to abridge. He used about one 
third of the Journey, but trusts that it may run along 
without too vividly reminding the traveler of one of 
those roads we travel in fancy. In each of these pieces 
we shall hear of heroic achievements, learn something 
of other literatures, and thrill with emotion over land- 
scapes of beauty and majesty. 

It is not rash to declare Christabcl the finest poem 
of the kind in English, for it stands alone. It, The 
Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan are, however, suffi- 
ciently alike, and sufficiently unlike anything else, to 
have a very small alcove to themselves in the great 
Library of Literature, revealed to the inward eye of the 
imagination by rays of that light which, elsewhere, 
never was. One of our recent histories has this to say 
of Christabcl: " Read and reread, the poem is seen to 
possess astonishing power — the noblest torso in Eng- 
lish Literature." " Again and again " is a wise direc- 
tion to give one about to make the acquaintance of any 
genuine bit of art. 

Charles James Fox's rank as an orator was among the 
very highest ; and in the times that tried men his vast 
powers were used on the side of the struggling colonies 
on this side the ocean ; yet in America he is compara- 
tively a stranger. We read Chatham's speeches and the 
younger Pitt's ; speaking more discriminately, we read 
about these orators and their orations in Macaulay's bril- 
liant essays; we read Burke's American Taxation and 
Conciliation with America, but we do not read Fox or 
about Fox ; and we cannot readily come at chapter or 
book if we wish to read. It may be admitted that his 
speeches do not make as good reading as Burke's or Web- 



viii INTRODUCTION 

ster's, but they are full of interest and instruction, and 
help us to a judgment as to what manner of man this 
was, and the times in which he acted so notable a part. 

If asked to name the noblest, most sublimely poetical 
appeal to the religious nature of man offered us by the 
nineteenth century, a great many confident voices would 
respond " Browning's Saul." Read attentively, it charms 
the ear with its trumpet lines and lifts the soul to a 
higher plane. It illustrates by a high example the power 
of music. It leaves the man, when the ecstatic mood has 
passed, readier to take fast hold of the duties that lie 
along life's common way. Once introduced by this work 
to this poet, the reader will enjoy being a frequent visitor, 
— will find it good to be there. 

The finest things which I could say about the most 
noted orator or poet would apply in substance to Charles 
Lamb, the essayist. Pages could be filled with words of 
appreciation spoken by the best critics of the writer's art 
about the Essays of Elia. If it were destiny's stern 
command that my library should be limited to ten authors, 
Lamb should be one. 

Landor is another author who is not found on many 
shelves, but would be, if the people knew what he has 
to say, and would once catch the flavor of his way of 
saying it. Of Burke and Shelley and Wordsworth and 
Milton I need not add a word. 

Throughout the book, here and there, the writers of 
whom I have been speaking will be heard expressing 
their opinion, as it were, about each other. It was thought 
this would be pleasing to the reader. There might be 
a short supplementary chapter, of the contents of which, 
let these be specimens : — 



INTRODUCTION ix 

a. Browning means Wordsworth in the lines, — 

" We that have loved him so, honored him, followed him, 
Lived in his mild and magnificent eye, 
Caught his clear accents, learned his great language, 
Made him our pattern to live or to die." 

b. Coleridge wrote one of his dramas upon a theme 
of Byron's selection. 

c. Johnson, the greatest talker in the world, said of 
Burke : " That fellow calls forth all my powers." 

d. When Byron made his fierce attack on bards and 
reviewers, he fell afoul of Wordsworth's The Idiot 
Boy: — 

"A moonstruck, silly lad, who lost his way, 
And like his bard, confounded night with day; 
So close on each pathetic part he dwells, 
And each adventure so sublimely tells, 
That all who view the idiot in his glory 
Conceive the bard the hero of the story," 

and a few lines below he declines to pass Coleridge 
unnoticed : — 

" Though themes of innocence amuse him best, 
Yet still obscurity's a welcome guest." 

In his private copy Byron afterward wrote " unjust " 
after the foregoing passages. 

e. A poem by Coleridge, To William Wordsworth, 
begins : " Friend of the wise ! and teacher of the good ! " 

/. At the dramatic falling out of Burke and Fox in 
the British Parliament, Fox fervently declared, " He has 
taught me more than all my books." 

g. Lamb wrote to Coeridge : " You will find your 



x INTRODUCTION 

old associate, in his second volume, dwindled into prose 
and criticism. ... or is it that as years come upon us, 
Life itself loses much of its Poetry for us ? We transcribe 
but what we read in the great volume of Nature; and 
as the characters grow dim, we turn off, and look another 
way. You. yourself write no Christabels nor Ancient 
Mariners now ; " and then Lamb looks back to the time 
" when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless, and you 
first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of 
poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." In one of his essays 
we read : " If thy heart overfloweth to lend them, lend 
thy books; but let it be to such a one as S. T. C. (Cole- 
ridge) : he will return them with usury, enriched with 
annotations tripling their value. I have had experience." 

Concerning the single but random sketch at the 
introduction of each author I would say, it is easily 
skipped but I hope that will not be its uniform fate. 
The footnotes might have been included in the above 
gracious hint and protest. To give aid to those who need 
it is their one purpose. Something can be said in an 
endeavor to justify the existence of notes, but it is much 
easier to be witty in the negative and show examples of 
annotation run wild. 

I suppose that the proper note is the one which 
aptly meets a question when the answer cannot be drawn 
from the context and is not found in a common diction- 
ary ; which gives just what help is needed for the full 
comprehension of the passage. In poetry, the offense 
is not beyond the benefit of clergy if the note, though not 
needed as above, show, since the style counts for so much, 
some other man's way of saying the same thing, or if 
it point to the spring at which our author drank. But 



INTRODUCTION xi 

" the fact is " that, like that of the man in Hudibras, " my 
preaching isn't sanctioned (always) by my practice." 

No one enjoys poetry to the limit of his privilege who 
does not note closely, and observe in his reading, the 
meter ; and, when rhyme is used, the scheme thereof, 
so that the ear may expect such and such a sequence of 
sounds and be pleased by it. Obedience to a rule we 
see at railway crossings : " Stop, look, and listen," will 
win much gratification at small cost in reading poetry 
aloud, and that's the more excellent way. 

The reader will now and then come upon a word 
marked with a minute circle, — a kindly hint that the 
dictionary is a good adviser right here. Many of these 
words are used in a sense different from their ordinary 
meaning ; for an example, Lamb's phrase, " reducing 
childhood," where " reducing " is plain Latin for " bring- 
ing back." 

This book goes out with the wish that it may be a 
source of pleasure and profit to many, and that it will 
tend to confirm them in the habit of reading and reading 
again. In that direction culture lies. B. 



^? 




LORD BYRON. 



LORD BYRON. 
1 788- 1 824. 

The story of the life of Lord Byron is one of exceed- 
ing interest, and it is one not at all well known, even by 
thousands who occasionally read and in some degree 
appreciate certain of his writings. The plan of this 
book, however, prevents any attempt at even a brief 
sketch. 

Born in 1788, the year of the first settlement in our 
great Northwest Territory, he died in 1824; a life, short, 
but full of labors. 

Byron laid his first literary product before the pub- 
lic in 1807, Hours of Idleness, by name. In a curious 
preface he says, " With slight hopes and some fears, I 
publish this first and last attempt." Whatever the merits 
and demerits of these poems, some of them are certainly 
remarkable, coming from a boy. Still, in one or two 
instances, boys of his age have done better. 

The Edinburgh Review sarcastically denied the right 
of the little book to exist, doubtless thought to cut that 
existence short and to confirm Byron in the resolution 
contained in the sentence just quoted. 

Following are two or three of its bitter comments : — 

" The poesy of this young lord belongs to the class 
which neither gods nor men are said to permit. Indeed, 
we do not recollect to have seen a quantity of verse with 
so few deviations in either direction from that exact 
standard. 

" We must beg leave seriously to assure him, that 



4 LORD BYRON 

the mere rhyming of the final syllable, even when accom- 
panied by the presence of a certain number of feet, . . . 
is not the whole art of poetry. We would entreat him 
to believe that a certain portion of liveliness, some- 
what of fancy, is necessary to constitute a poem, and 
that a poem in the present day, to be read, must contain 
at least one thought, either in a little degree different 
from the ideas of former writers, or differently ex- 
pressed." 

There was some Ossianic poetry, as the Review terms 
it, in the thin volume. Relative to this it declares itself no 
judge, yet calling up in evidence some passages, it goes 
so far as to venture this opinion in their favor : " They 
look very like Macpherson ; and we are positive they are 
pretty nearly as stupid and tiresome." 

The " young lord " did not receive his lecture with 
the slightest degree of meekness. Seizing his weapon 
of defense, — and offense, — in English Bards and 
Scotch Reviezvers, he rushed to the fray. In what he 
says to the latter class of literary folk he is giving an 
eye for an eye, but he stoutly rang his spear against 
the shields of the former, and, sometimes, unfortunately, 
in lines much easier retained in one's memory. His war- 
cry was — 

"Prepare for rhyme — I'll publish right or wrong; 
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song." 

The critic of the Review roused him to show the 
world that he had in him stuff that did not deserve 
the Review's cruel taunts, and his reply was the begin- 
ning of his fame. 

Some of his more prominent poetic creations are, 
The Prisoner of Chillon, The Corsair, The Lament of 



LORD BYRON 5 

Tasso, Marino Falicro, Cain, Don Juan, and, last named, 
but surely the greatest, Childe Harold. 

Among Byron's intimate literary associates were 
Moore, Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt. With Scott 
he had some personal acquaintance. Scott's nom de 
plume did not conceal from Byron the author of Waverley, 
and Scott, so the story runs, said that he ceased the 
writing of stirring metrical romances, " because Byron 
beat me." 

Though led bodily captive by his own passions, Byron's 
tumultuous soul beat strong for human liberty. His 
message to peoples under oppression's iron hand was : — 

Hereditary bondsmen ! know ye not 

Who would be free themselves must strike the blow ? 

When Greece, long in servitude to the tyrant at 
Constantinople " struck the blow," Byron threw himself 
with ardor into their cause, giving to its furtherance 
his time, energy, and money. 

What might have been a brilliant military career was 
checked in its outburst. Byron died of a fever at Misso- 
longhi, in the spring of 1824. 



Childe 1 Harold's Pilgrimage 



CANTO THE THIRD. 2 

Is thy face like thy mother's, my fair child, l 

Ada, sole daughter of my house and heart? 
When last I saw thy young blue eyes they smiled, 
And then we parted, — not as now we part, 
But with a hope. — 

Awaking with a start, 
The waters heave around me, and on high 
The winds lift up their voices : I depart, 3 
Whither I know not ; but the hour's gone by 
When Albion's lessening shores could grieve or glad 
mine eye. 

Once more upon the waters, — yet once more! I0 
And the waves bound beneath me as a steed 
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar ! 
Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er it lead ! 
Tho' the strain'd mast should quiver as a reed, 
And the rent canvas fluttering strew the gale, 
Still must I on ; for I am as a weed, 
Flung from the rock, on Ocean's foam to sail 
Where'er the surge may sweep, the tempest's breath 
prevail. 



1 Once meant a noble youth. " Used here as more consonant 
with the old structure of the versification which I have adopted." 
— Byron. 

2 Written at Geneva. 

3 1816. Byron left England — "Albion" — never to return. 

7 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

In my youth's summer I did sing of One, 4 I9 

The wandering outlaw of his own dark mind ; 
Again 5 I seize the theme then but begun, 
And bear it with me, as the rushing wind 
Bears the cloud onward: in that Tale I find 
The furrows of long thought, and dried-up tears, 
Which, ebbing, leave a sterile track behind, 
O'er which all heavily the journeying years 
Plod the last sands of life, — where not a flower 
appears. 

Since my young days of passion — joy, or pain — 28 
Perchance my heart and harp have lost a string, 
And both may jar; it may be that in vain 
I would essay as I have sung to sing. 
Yet, though a dreary strain, to this I cling; 
So that it wean G me from the weary dream 
Of selfish grief or gladness — so it fling 
Forgetfulness around me — it shall seem 
To me, tho' to none else, a not ungrateful theme. 

He who, grown aged in this world of woe, 37 

In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, 

So that no wonder waits him, 7 nor below 

Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife, 

Cut to his heart again with the keen knife 

Of silent, sharp endurance, — he can tell 

Why thought 8 seeks refuge in lone caves, 8 yet rife 



4 Childe Harold, in Cantos I and II. 
~° Eight years from time of beginning. 

6 Alleged purpose. 

7 Has seen them all. 

8 " From the deep caves of thought." — Holmes. 



LORD BYRON 9 

With airy ° images and shapes ° which dwell 
Still unimpair'd, tho' old, in the soul's haunted cell. 

Something too much of this : — but now 't is past, 46 
And the spell closes with its silent seal. 
Long-absent Harold reappears at last, 
He of the breast which fain no more would feel, 
Wrung with the wounds which kill not, but ne'er . 

heal ; 
Yet Time, who changes all, had alter'd him 
In soul and aspect as in age : years steal 
Fire from the mind as vigor from the limb, 
And life's enchanted cup but sparkles near the brim. 10 

Where rose the mountains, there to him were ss 

friends ; 
Where roll'd the ocean, thereon was his home ; X1 
Where a blue sky, and glowing clime, extends, 
He had the passion and the power to roam ; 
The desert, forest, cavern, breaker's foam, 
Were unto him companionship ; they spake 
A mutual language, clearer than the tome° 
Of his land's tongue, which he would oft forsake 
For Nature's pages glass'd by sunbeams on the lake. 

Like the Chaldean, he could watch the stars, 64 

Till he had peopled them with beings bright 

As their own beams ; and earth, and earth-born jars, 



9 " Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, 
And airy tongues that syllable men's names." 

— Milton. 
10 The brim is youth; age and staleness lie beneath. 
11 " His hearth, the earth, his hall, the azure dome." — Emerson. 



» CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

And human frailties were forgotten quite: 
Could he have kept his spirit to that flight, 
He had been happy; but this clay will sink 
Its spark immortal, envying it the light 
To which it mounts, as if to break the link 
That keeps us from yon heaven which woos us to its 
brink. 

Stop! ]2 — for thy tread is on an Empire's dust! 73 
An earthquake's spoil is sepulchered below ! 
Is the spot mark'd 13 with no colossal bust, 
Nor column trophied for triumphal show? 
None, — but the moral's truth tells simpler so ; 
As the ground was before, thus let it be ; — 
How that red rain hath made the harvest grow ! 
And is this all the world has gain'd by thee, 
Thou first and last of fields, king-making Victory? 

There was a sound of revelry 14 by night, 82 

And Belgium's capital had gather'd then 15 
Her Beauty and Her Chivalry, and bright 
The lamps shone o'er fair women and brave men ; 
A thousand hearts beat happily ; and when 
Music arose with its voluptuous swell, 
Soft eyes look'd love to eyes which spake again, 
And all went merry as a marriage-bell ; 
But hush ! hark ! a deep sound strikes like a rising 
knell ! 



12 Abrupt as the explosion of a cannon. 

13 Is it yet unmarked ? 

14 " On the night previous to the action it is said that a ball 
was given at Brussels." — Byron. 

15 " In spite of rhyme," often quoted, " gather'd there." 



LORD BYRON n 

Did ye not hear it ? — No ; 'twas but the wind, 9I 
Or the car rattling o'er the stony street ; 
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined ; 
TMo sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet 
To chase the glowing Hours with flying feet. — 
But hark ! — that heavy sound breaks in once more, 
As if the clouds its echo would repeat ; 
And nearer, clearer, deadlier than before! 
Arm ! arm ! it is — it is — the cannon's opening roar ! 

Ah, then and there was hurrying to and fro, I0 ° 

And gathering tears, and tremblings of distress, 
And cheeks all pale, which but an hour ago 
Blush'd at the praise of their own loveliness ; 
And there were sudden partings, such as press 
The life from out young hearts, and choking sighs 
Which ne'er might be repeated ; who could guess 
If ever more should meet those mutual eyes, 16 
Since upon night so sweet such awful morn could rise? 

And there was mounting in hot haste : the steed, I0 9 
The mustering squadron, and the clattering car, 
Went pouring forward with impetuous speed, 
And swiftly forming in the ranks of war; 
And the deep thunder peal on peal afar, 
And near, the beat of the alarming drum 
Roused up the soldier ere the morning star ; 
While throng'd the citizens with terror dumb, 
Or whispering, with white lips — " The foe ! they come ! 
they come ! " 



If those eyes now meeting should ever meet again. 



CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

And Ardennes 17 waves above them her green II8 

leaves, 
Dewy with Nature's tear-drops, as they pass, 
Grieving, if aught inanimate e'er grieves, 
Over the unreturning brave, — alas ! 
Ere evening to be trodden like the grass 
Which now beneath them, but above shall grow 
In its next verdure, when this fiery mass 
Of living valor, rolling on the foe 
And burning with high hope, shall molder cold and 

low. 

Last noon beheld them full of lusty life, 127 

Last eve in Beauty's circle proudly gay ; 
The midnight brought the signal-sound of strife, 
The morn the marshaling in arms, — the day 
Battle's magnificently 1S stern array ! 
The thunder-clouds close o'er it, which when rent 
The earth is cover'd thick with other clay, 19 
Which her own clay shall cover, heap'd and pent, 
Rider and horse, — friend, foe, — in one red burial 
blent ! 

Their praise is hymn'd by loftier harps than mine ; 13<5 
Yet one I would select from that proud throng, 
Partly because they blend me with his line, 
And partly that I did his sire some wrong, 
And partly that bright names will hallow song; 



17 " The wood of Soignies is supposed to be a remnant of the 
' forest of Arden,' immortal in ' As You Like It.' " — Byron. Pro- 
nounced " Arden." 

18 Note the force of the long, strong word. 
. M Explained in the last line of the stanza. 



LORD BYRON 13 

And his was of the bravest, and when shower'd 
The death-bolts deadliest the thinn'd files along, 
Even where the thickest of war's tempest lower'd, 
They reach'd no nobler breast than thine, young gal- 
lant Howard ! 

There have been tears and breaking hearts for I4 $ 

thee, 
And mine were nothing, had I such to give ; 
But when I stood beneath the fresh green tree 
Which living waves where thou didst cease to live, 
And saw around me the wide field revive 
With fruits and fertile promise, and the Spring 
Come forth her work of gladness to contrive, 
With all her reckless birds upon the wing, 
I turn'd from all she brought to those 20 she could not 
bring. 

There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men, IS4 
Whose spirit, antithetically mixt, 
One moment of the mightiest, and again 
On little objects with like firmness fixt ; 
Extreme in all things ! hadst thou been betwixt, 
Thy throne had still been thine, or never been ; 
For daring made thy rise as fall ; thou seek'st 
Even now 21 to reassume the imperial mien, 
And shake the world, the Thunderer of the scene ! 



20 " The place where Major Howard fell was not far from two 
tall and solitary trees. Beneath these he died and was buried. I 
went on horseback twice over the field, comparing it with my 
recollection of similar scenes. Waterloo seems marked out for the 
scene of some great action, though this may be imagination." — 
Byron. 

21 What scene in Napoleon's great world drama is here pointed 
out? 



i 4 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Oh, more or less than man — in high or low, l63 
Battling with nations, flying from the field; 
Now making monarchs' necks thy footstool, now 
More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield ; 
An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild, 
But govern 22 not thy pettiest passion, nor, 
However deeply in men's spirits skill'd, 
Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of war, 
Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest 
star ! 23 

If, like a tower upon a headlong rock, ^ 2 

Thou hadst been made to stand or fall alone, 
Such scorn of man had help'd to brave the shock ; 
But men's thoughts 24 were the steps which paved thy 

throne, 
Their admiration thy best weapon shone : 
The part of Philip's son was thine, not then, — 
Unless aside thy purple had been thrown, — 
Like stern Diogenes to mock at men; 
For sceptered cynics, earth were far too wide a den. 

He who ascends to mountain-tops shall find lSl 

The loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow ; 
He who surpasses or subdues mankind 
Must look down on the hate of those below. 
Though high above the sun of glory glow, 
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread, 



22 Bible allusion ; quote it or hunt it. 

23 Desert a man when at the pinnacle of his fame. 

24 Napoleon, at the height, seemed to scorn men and their 
thoughts. He might conquer the world like Alexander, but needed 
only a tub to imitate Diogenes. 



LORD BYRON 15 

Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow 
Contending tempests on his naked head, 
And thus reward the toils which to those summits led. 

Away with these ! true Wisdom's world will be I9 ° 
Within its own creation, — or in thine, 
Maternal Nature ! for who teems like thee, 
Thus on the banks of thy majestic Rhine? 
There Harold gazes on a work divine, 
A blending of all beauties : streams and dells, 
Fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine, 
And chiefless castles breathing stern farewells 
From gray but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells. 

But thou, exulting and abounding river! I99 

Making thy waves a blessing as they flow 
Through banks whose beauty would endure forever 
Could man but leave thy bright creation so, 
Nor its fair promise from the surface mow 
With the sharp scythe of conflict, — then to see 
Thy valley of sweet waters were to know 
Earth 25 paved like heaven ; and to seem such to me, 
Even now what wants thy stream? — that it should 
Lethe 26 be. 

By Coblentz, on a rise of gentle ground, 2o8 

There is a small and simple pyramid, 
Crowning the summit of the verdant mound ; 
Beneath its base are heroes' ashes hid, 
Our enemy's, — but let not that forbid 



25 " Earth is crammed with Heaven." — Mrs. Browning. 

20 Byron would forget the past, and Lethe is the river of oblivion. 



1 6 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Honor to Marceau, 27 o'er whose early tomb 
Tears, big tears, gush'd from the rough soldier's lid, 
Lamenting and yet envying such a doom, 
Falling for France, whose rights he battled to resume. 

Brief, brave, and glorious was his young career, 2I ? 
His mourners were two hosts, his friends and foes ; 
And fitly may the stranger lingering here 
Pray for his gallant spirit's bright repose : 
For he was Freedom's champion, one of those, 
The few in number, who had not o'erstept 
The charter to chastise which she bestows 
On such as wield her weapons ; he had kept 
The whiteness of his soul, and thus men o'er him wept. 

Here Ehrenbreitstein, 28 with her shatter'd wall 226 
Black with the miner's blast, upon her height 
Yet shows of what she was, when shell and ball 
Rebounding idly on her strength did light ; 
A tower of victory, from whence the flight 
Of baffled foes was watch'd along the plain! 
But Peace destroy'd what War could never blight, 
And laid those proud roofs bare to Summer's rain, 
On which the iron shower for years had pour'd in vain. 

Adieu to thee, fair Rhine ! How long delighted 23S 
The stranger fain would linger on his way! 



27 The monument of the young and lamented General Marceau, 
killed on the last day of the fourth year of the Republic, still re- 
mains. The inscriptions are rather too long, and not required ; his 
name was enough. — Byron. 

28 Ehrenbreitstein, one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, was 
blown up by the French at the truce of Leoben. — Byron. 



LORD BYRON 17 

Thine is a scene alike where souls united 
Or lonely Contemplation 29 thus might stray ; 
And could the ceaseless vultures cease to prey 
On self-condemning bosoms, it were here, 
Where Nature, nor too somber nor too gay, 
Wild but not rude, awful yet not austere, 
Is to the mellow earth as Autumn to the year. 

Adieu to thee again ! — a vain 30 adieu ! 244 

There can be no farewell to scene like thine; 
The mind is color'd by thine every hue, 
And if reluctantly the eyes resign 
Their cherish'd gaze upon thee, lovely Rhine, 
'Tis with the thankful glance of parting praise : 
More mighty spots may rise — more glaring shine, 
But none united in one attaching maze 
The brilliant, fair, and soft, — the glories of old days, 

The negligently grand, the fruitful bloom 2 ^i 

Of coming ripeness, the white city's sheen, 
The rolling stream, the precipice's gloom, 
The forest's growth and Gothic walls between, 
The wild rocks shaped as they had turrets been 
In mockery 31 of man's art ; and these withal 
A race of faces happy as the scene, 
Whose fertile bounties here extend to all, 
Still springing o'er thy banks, though empires near 
them fall. 



29 " by lonely Contemplation led." — Gray. 

30 Why "vain"? 

31 " No mortal builder's most rare device 
Could match this winter-palace of ice." 

— Lowell. 



1 8 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

But these recede. 32 Above me are the Alps, 262 

The palaces of Nature, whose vast walls 
Have pinnacled in clouds their snowy scalps, 
And throned Eternity in icy halls 
Of cold sublimity, where forms and falls 
The avalanche — the thunderbolt of snow ! 
All that expands the spirit, yet appals, 
Gather around these summits, as to show 
How earth may pierce to heaven, yet leave vain man 
below. 

Lake Leman woos me with its crystal face, 271 

The mirror where the stars and mountains view 
The stillness of their aspect in each trace 
Its clear depth yields of their far height and hue. 
There is too much of man here, to look through 
With a fit mind the might which I behold ; 
But soon in me shall loneliness renew 
Thoughts hid, but not less cherished than of old, 
Ere mingling 33 with the herd had penn'd me in their 
fold. 

I live not in myself, but I become 28 ° 

Portion of that around me ; and to me 

High mountains are a feeling, but the hum 

Of human cities torture ; I can see 

Nothing to loathe in Nature, save to be 

A link reluctant in a fleshly chain, 



32 1 leave them, the beauties of the Rhine, for the sublimities of 
the Alps. 

33 " with low-thoughted care 

Confined, and pestered in this pinfold here." 

— Milton. 



LORD BYRON 19 

Class'd among creatures, when the soul can flee, 
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain 
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain. 

Are not the mountains, waves, and skies a part 28 9 
Of me 34 and of my soul, as I of them? 
Is not the love of these deep in my heart 
With a pure passion? should I not contemn 
All objects, if compared with these? and stem 
A tide of suffering, rather than forego 
Such feelings for the hard and worldly phlegm 
Of those whose eyes are only turn'd below, 
Gazing upon the ground, with thoughts which dare not 
glow ? 

Clear, placid Leman ! thy contrasted lake 35 2g8 

With the wild world I dwelt in is a thing 
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake 
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring. 
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing 
To waft me from distraction ; once I loved 
Torn Ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring 
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved, 
That I with stern delights should e'er have been so 
moved. 

It is' the hush of night, and all between 3 ° 7 

Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear, 
Mellow'd and mingling, yet .distinctly seen, 
Save darken'd Jura, whose capt 3G heights appear 



34 " I am a part of all that I have met." — Tennyson's Ulysses. 

35 Thy lake contrasted with. 
30 With what ? 



3 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Precipitously steep ; and drawing near, 
There breathes a living fragrance from the shore 
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood ; on the ear 
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, 
Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more. 

He is an evening reveler, who makes 3l6 

His life an infancy, and sings his fill ; 
At intervals, some bird from out the brakes 
Starts into voice a moment, then is still. 
There seems a floating whisper on the hill, 
But that is fancy, for the starlight dews 
All silently their tears of love instill, 
Weeping themselves away, till they infuse 
Deep into Nature's breast the spirit of her hues. 

Ye stars, which are the poetry of heaven! 325 

If in your bright leaves we would read the fate 
Of men and empires, — 'tis to be forgiven, 
That in our aspirations to be great 
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state, 
And claim a kindred with you ; for ye are 
A beauty and a mystery, and create 
In us such love and reverence from afar, 
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves 
a star. 

All heaven and earth are still — though not in 334 

sleep, # 

But breathless, as we grow when feeling most, 
And silent, as we stand in thoughts too deep : — 
All heaven and earth are still ; from the high host 
Of stars, to the lull'd lake and mountain-coast, 



LORD BYRON 21 

All is concentered in a life intense, 
Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost, 
But hath a part of being, and a sense 
Of that which is of all Creator and defense. 

The sky is changed ! — and such a change ! O 343 

night, 
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, 
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light 
Of a dark eye in woman ! Far along, 
From peak to peak, the rattling crags among, 
Leaps the live thunder ! not from one lone cloud, 
But every mountain now hath found a tongue, 
And Jura 37 answers, through her misty shroud, 
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud! 

And this is in the night. — Most glorious night ! 352 
Thou wert not sent for slumber ! let me be 
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, — 
A portion of the tempest and of thee ! 
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea, 
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth ! 
And now again 'tis black, 38 — and now the glee 
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, 
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth. 

Now where the swift Rhone cleaves his way 361 

between 
Heights which appear as lovers 39 who have parted 
In hate, whose mining depths so intervene 



""darkened Jura." Line 310. 

38 What is? 

BU Compare with this stanza, Christabel, Part the Second, Lines 
411-429. Can this be one of those mooted passages spoken of in 
Coleridge's Preface? 



> CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

That they can meet no more, tho' broken-hearted ; 
Though in their souls, which thus each other 

thwarted, 
Love was the very root of the fond rage 
Which blighted their life's bloom and then departed ; 
Itself expired, but leaving them an age 
Of years all winters., — war within themselves to wage. 

Now where the quick Rhone thus hath cleft his 37 ° 

way, 
-The mightiest of the storms hath ta'en his stand : 
For here, not one, but many, make their play, 
And fling their thunderbolts from hand to hand, 
Flashing and cast around ; of all the band, 
The brightest through these parted hills hath fork'd 
His lightnings, — as if he did understand 
That in such gaps as desolation work'd 
There the hot shaft should blast whatever therein lurk'd. 

Sky, mountains, river, winds, lake, lightnings ! ye, 379 
With night, and clouds, and thunder, and a soul 
To make these felt and feeling, well may be 
Things that have made me watchful ; the far roll 
Of your departing voices is the knoll 
Of what in me is sleepless, — if I rest. 
But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal? 
Are ye like those within the human breast 
Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest? 

Could I embody and unbosom now 388 

That which is most within me, — could I wreak 
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw 
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak. 



LORD BYRON 23 

All that I would have sought, and all I seek, 
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe — into one word, 
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak ; 
But as it is, I live and die unheard, 
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword. 

The morn is up again, the dewy morn, 397 

With breath all incense and with cheek all bloom, 
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, 
And living as if earth contain'd no tomb, — 
And glowing into clay ; we may resume 
The march of our existence : and thus I, 
Still on thy shores, fair Leman, may find room 
And food for meditation, nor pass by 
Much that may give us pause, if ponder'd fittingly. 

Clarens, sweet Clarens, birthplace of deep Love ! 4 ° 6 
Thine air is the young breath of passionate thought ; 
Thy trees take root in Love ; the snows above 
The very glaciers have his colors caught, 
And sunset into rose-hues 40 sees them wrought 
By rays which sleep there lovingly : the rocks, 
The permanent crags, tell here of Love, who sought 
In them a refuge from the worldly shocks 
Which stir and sting the soul with hope that woos, 
then mocks. 

Clarens, by heavenly feet thy paths are trod, — 4 ' 5 



40 Rousseau has written it, " une belle coulcur de rose," as the 
tint of the mountain tops. 



24 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Undying Love's, 41 who here ascends a throne 
To which the steps are mountains ; where the god 
Is a pervading life and light, — so shown 
Not on those summits solely, nor alone 
In the still cave and forest; o'er the flower 
His eye is sparkling and his breath hath blown, 
His soft and summer breath, whose tender pow*er 
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate 
hour. 

All things are here of him; from the black pines, 424 
Which are his shade on high, and the loud roar 
Of torrents, where he listeneth, to the vines 
Which slope his green path downward to the shore, 
Where the bow'd waters meet him and adore, 
Kissing his feet with murmurs ; and the wood, 
The covert of old trees, with trunks all hoar, 
But light leaves young as joy, stands where it stood, 
Offering to him and his a populous solitude. 

He who hath loved not here would learn that 433 

lore, 
And make his heart a spirit; he who knows 
That tender mystery will love the more, — 
For this is Love's recess, where vain men's woes, 
And the world's waste, have driven him far from 

those, 
For 'tis his nature to advance or die ; 
He stands not still, but or decays or grows 



41 Elsewhere, in praise of mountains, Byron wrote : " It is to be 
recollected that the most beautiful and impressive doctrines of the 
divine Founder of Christianity, were delivered, not in the Temple, 
but on the Mount." 



LORD BYRON 25 

Into a boundless blessing, which may vie 
With the immortal lights in its eternity ! 

'Twas not for fiction chose Rousseau this spot, 442 
Peopling it with affections, but he found 
It was the scene which Passion must allot 
To the mind's purified beings ; 'twas the ground 
Where early Love his Psyche's zone unbound, 
And hallow'd it with loveliness : 'tis lone, 
And wonderful, and deep, and hath a sound, 
And sense, and sight of sweetness ; here the Rhone 
Hath spread himself a couch, the Alps have rear'd a 
throne. 

Lausanne and Ferney, 42 ye have been the abodes 4SI 
Of names which unto you bequeath'd a name ; 
Mortals who sought and found, by dangerous roads, 
A path to perpetuity of fame : 
They were gigantic minds, and their steep aim 
Was, Titan-like, on daring doubts to pile 
Thoughts which should call down thunder, and the 

flame 
Of Heaven again assail'd, if Heaven the while 
On man and man's research could deign do more than 

smile. 

But let me quit man's works, again to read 46 ° 

His Maker's, spread around me, and suspend 

This page, which from my reveries I feed 

Until it seems prolonging without end. 

The clouds above me to the white Alps tend, 

And I must pierce them and survey whate'er 



Voltaire and Gibbon. 






26 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

May be permitted, as my steps I bend 
To their most great and growing region, where 
The earth to her embrace compels the powers of air. 

Italia, too, Italia! looking on thee, 4<5e 

Full flashes on the soul the light of ages, 
Since the fierce Carthaginian 43 almost won thee, 
To the last halo of the chiefs and sages 44 
Who glorify thy consecrated pages : 
Thou wert the throne and grave of empires ; still 
The fount at which the panting mind i5 assuages 
Her thirst of knowledge, quaffing there her fill, 
Flows from the eternal source of Rome's imperial hill. 

Thus far have I proceeded in a theme 478 

Renew'd with no kind auspices : — to feel 
We are not what we have been, and to deem 
We are not what we should be, and to steel 
The heart against itself; and to conceal, 
With a proud caution, love, or hate, or aught — 
Passion or feeling, purpose, grief, or zeal — 
Which is the tyrant spirit of our thought, 
Is a stern task of soul. — No matter, — it is taught. 

And for these words, thus woven into song, 487 

It may be that they are a harmless wile, — 
The coloring of the scenes which fleet along, 
Which I would seize, in passing, to beguile 
My breast, or that of others, for a while. 



43 Hannibal. 

44 Poets, orators, historians, philosophers. 

45 " Mind," feminine, anima? "Animus est quo sapimus, anima, 

quo vivimus." - — Longimus. 



LORD BYRON 27 

Fame 4fi is the thirst of youth, but I am not 
So young as to regard men's frown or smile 
As loss or guerdon of a glorious lot ; 
I stood and stand alone, — remember'd or forgot. 

I have not loved the world, nor the world me; ^ 6 
I have not flatter'd its rank breath, nor bow'd 
To its idolatries a patient knee, 
Nor coin'd my cheek to smiles, nor cried aloud 
In worship of an echo ; in the crowd 
They could not deem me one of such ; I stood 
Among them, but not of them, in a shroud 
Of thoughts which were not their thoughts, and still 
could, 
Had I not filed 4T my mind, which thus itself subdued. 

I have not loved the world, nor the world me, — s ° 5 
But let us part fair foes ; I do believe, 
Though I have found them not, that there may be 
Words which are things, hopes which will not de- 
ceive, 
And virtues which are merciful, nor weave 
Snares for the failing : I would also deem 
O'er others' griefs that some sincerely grieve ; 
That two, or one, are almost what they seem, — 
That goodness is no name, and happiness no dream. 

My daughter! with thy name this song begun; SI4 
My daughter ! with thy name thus much shall end ; 



Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 

(That last infirmity of noble mind) 

To scorn delights, and live laborious days." 

— Milton's Lycidas. 
' For Banquo's issue have I filed my mind." — Shakespeare. 



28 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

I see thee not, I hear thee not, but none 
Can be so wrapt in thee ; thou are the friend 
To whom the shadows of far years extend : 
Albeit my brow thou never shouldst behold, 
My voice shall with thy future visions blend, 
And reach into thy heart when mine is cold, — 
A token and a tone, even from thy father's mold. 

To aid thy mind's development, to watch 523 

Thy dawn of little joys, to sit and see 
Almost thy very growth, to view thee catch 
Knowledge of objects, — wonders yet to thee! 
To hold thee lightly on a gentle knee, 
And print on thy soft cheek a parent's kiss, — 
This it should seem, was not reserved for me; 
' Yet this was in my nature : — as it is, 
I know not what is there, yet something like to this. 



CANTO THE FOURTH. 

I stood in Venice, 1 on the Bridge 2 of Sighs ; ' 

A palace and a prison on each hand : 
I saw from out the wave her structures rise 
As from the stroke of the enchanter's wand : 
A thousand years their cloudy wings expand 
Around me, and a dying glory smiles 
O'er the far times when many a subject land 
Look'd to the winged Lion's 3 marble piles, 
Where Venice sate in state, throned on her hundred 
isles ! 

She looks a sea Cybele, 4 fresh from ocean, I0 

Rising with her tiara of proud towers 
At airy distance, with majestic motion, 
A ruler of the waters and their powers : 
And such she was ; her daughters had their dowers 
From spoils of nations, and the exhaustless East 
Pour'd in her lap all gems in sparkling showers. 
In purple was she robed, and of her feast 
Monarchs partook, and deem'd their dignity increased. 



1 This Canto was written at Venice. " Everything about Venice 
is, or was, extraordinary — her aspect is like a dream, and her his- 
tory is like a romance." — From preface to Marino Faliero. 

2 The communication between the ducal palace and the prisons 
of Venice is by a gloomy bridge, or covered gallery, high above the 
water, and divided by a stone wall into a passage and a cell. . . . 
The low portal through which the criminal was taken into this cell 
is now walled up, but the passage is still open, and is still known 
by the name of the Bridge of Sighs. — Byron. 

8 The Lion of St. Mark, the standard of the republic. 
4 Mother of the gods ; presided over mountain fastnesses. 

29 



30 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

In Venice Tasso's 5 echoes are no more, I9 

And silent rows the songless gondolier ; 
Her palaces are crumbling to the shore, 
And music meets not always now the ear : 
Those days are gone — but Beauty still is here. 
States fall, arts fade — but Nature doth not die, 
Nor yet forget how Venice once was dear, 
The pleasant place of all festivity, 
The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy ! 

But unto us she hath a- spell beyond 28 

Her name in story, and her long array 
Of mighty shadows, whose dim forms despond 
Above the dogeless city's vanish'd sway : 
Ours is a trophy which will not decay 
With the Rialto ; Shylock and the Moor, 
And Pierre, cannot be swept 6 or worn away — 
The keystones of the arch ! though all were o'er, ■ 
For us repeopled were the solitary shore. 

The beings of the mind are not of clay ; 37 

Essentially immortal, they create 

And multiply in us a brighter ray 

And more beloved existence : that which Fate 

Prohibits to dull life, in this our state 

Of mortal bondage, by these spirits supplied, 

First exiles, then replaces what we hate; 



5 " In Venice the gondoliers know by heart long passages from 
Ariosto and Tasso, and often chant them with a peculiar melody. 
If Lord Byron's statement be not more poetical than true, it must 
have occurred at a moment when their last political change may 
have occasioned this silence on the waters." — Disraeli's Curiosities 
of Literature. 

6 Embodied in immortal literature. 



LORD BYRON 31 

Watering the heart whose early flowers have died, 
And with a fresher growth replenishing the void. 

Before Saint Mark 7 still glow his steeds of brass, 46 
Their gilded collars glittering in the sun ; 
But is not Doria's 8 menace come to pass ? 
Are they not bridled? — Venice, 9 lost and won, 
Her thirteen hundred years of freedom done, 
Sinks, like a seaweed, into whence she rose ! 
Better be whelm'd beneath the waves, and shun, 
Even in destruction's depth, her foreign foes, 
From whom submission wrings an infamous repose. 

When Athens' armies fell at Syracuse, 55 

And fetter'd thousands bore the yoke of war, 
Redemption rose up in the Attic Muse, 9a 
Her voice their only ransom from afar : 
See ! as they chant the tragic hymn, the car 
Of the o'ermaster'd victor stops, the reins 
Fall from his hands, his idle scimitar 
Starts from its belt — he rends his captive's chains, 
And bids him thank the bard for freedom and his 
strains. 

Thus, Venice, if no stronger claim were thine, 64 
Were all thy proud historic deeds forgot, 
Thy choral memory of the Bard divine, 



7 The great cathedral, with its mighty steeds of brass. 

8 In 1379, when Venice offered to surrender on any terms leav- 
ing her her independence, Doria, commander of the Genoese, replied : 
" No peace till we have first put a rein on those unbridled horses of 
yours." But he did not do it. What then does Byron mean ? 

"Venice ceased to be free in 1796, the fifth year of the French 
republic. 

"a Plutarch tells the story in his life of Nicias. 



32 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Thy love of Tasso, should have cut the knot 10 
Which ties thee to thy tyrants ; and thy lot 
Is shameful to the nations, — most of all, 
Albion, to thee ! the Ocean Queen should not 
Abandon Ocean's children ; in the fall 
Of Venice think of thine, 11 despite thy watery wall. 

The moon is up, and yet it is not night, — 73 

Sunset divides the sky with her, — a sea 
Of glory streams along the Alpine height 
Of blue Friuli's mountains ; heaven is free 
From clouds, but of all colors seems to be, — 
Melted to one vast Iris of the West, 
Where the day joins the past eternity; 12 
While, on the other hand, 13 meek Dian's crest 
Floats thro' the azure air — an island of the blest ! 

A single star is at her side, and reigns 82 

With her o'er half the lovely heaven ; but still 
Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains 
Roll'd o'er the peak of the far Rhastian hill, 
As Day and Night contending were, until 
Nature reclaim'd her order : — gently flows 
The deep-dyed Brenta, where their 14 hues instill 
The odorous purple of a new-born rose, 
Which streams upon her stream, and glass'd within 
it glows, 



10 Venice's love of Tasso should have gained her a champion — 
England. 

11 A gloomy prophecy, not yet come true. 
13 And becomes yesterday. 
13 The east. Moon nearing her full. 
"Day and Night. 



LORD BYRON 33 

Fill'd with the face of heaven, which, from afar, 91 
Comes down upon the waters; all its hues, 
From the rich sunset to the rising star, 
Their magical variety diffuse : 
And now they change ; a paler shadow strews 
Its mantle o'er the mountains ; parting Day 
Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues 
With a new color as it gasps away, 
The last still loveliest, till — 'tis gone — and all is gray. 

There is a tomb in Arqua ; — rear'd in air, I0 ° 

Pillar'd in their sarcophagus, repose 
The bones of Laura's lover : 15 here repair 
Many familiar with his well-sung woes, 
The pilgrims of his genius. He arose 
To raise 16 a language, and his land reclaim 
From the dull yoke of her barbaric foes : 
Watering the tree 1T which bears his lady's name 
With his melodious tears, he gave himself to fame. 

They keep his dust in Arqua, where he died, I09 

The mountain-village where his latter days 
Went down the vale of years ; and 'tis their pride — 
An honest pride — and let it be their praise, 
To offer to the passing stranger's gaze 
His mansion and his sepulcher ; both plain 
And venerably simple, such as raise 
A feeling more accordant with his strain 
Than if a pyramid form'd his monumental fane. 



15 Petrarch, first and greatest lyric poet of Italy, born 1304. 
10 As Chaucer did. 
17 The laurel. 
3 



34 CHILD E HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Ferrara, ls in thy wide and grass-grown streets, II8 
Whose symmetry was not for solitude, 19 
There seems as 't were a curse upon the seats 
Of former sovereigns, and the antique brood 
Of Este, 20 which for many an age made good 
Its strength within thy walls, and was of yore 
Patron or tyrant, as the changing mood 
Of petty power impell'd, of those who wore 
The wreath which Dante's brow alone had worn before. 

And Tasso 21 is their glory and their shame. 21 I2 ~ 
Hark to his strain, — and then survey his cell ! 
And see how dearly earn'd Torquato's fame, 
And where Alfonso bade his poet dwell ; 
The miserable despot 22 could not quell 
The insulted mind he sought to quench, and blend 
With the surrounding maniacs, in the hell 
Where he had plunged it. Glory without end 
Scatter'd the clouds away — and on that name attend 

The tears and praises of all time; while thine ^ 6 

Would rot in its oblivion — in the sink 

Of worthless dust, which from thy boasted line 



1S Ducal seat of Alfonso. 

19 An architectural flower not " born to blush unseen." 

20 The ducal family. 

"\Tasso was confined in a madman's cell in the hospital at 
Ferrara. 

" While thou, Ferrara ! when no longer dwell 
The ducal chiefs within thee, shalt fall down, 
A poet's wreath shall be thine only crown, 
A poet's dungeon thy most far renown." 

— The Lament of Tasso. 
" : With the next fourteen lines compare Shelley's branding of 
Keats's critic, Adonais, lines 325-342. 



LORD BYRON 35 

Is shaken into nothing; but the link 
Thou formest in his fortunes bids us think 
Of thy poor malice, naming thee with scorn : 
Alfonso, how thy ducal pageants shrink 
From thee ! if in another station born, 
Scarce fit to be the slave of him thou madest to mourn ! 

Thou, form'd to eat, and be despised, and die, I45 
Even as the beasts that perish, save that thou 
Had'st a more splendid trough and wider sty ! 
He, with a glory round his furrow'd brow, 
Which emanated then, and dazzles now, 
In face of all his foes, the Cruscan 23 quire, 
And Boileau, 24 whose rash envy could allow 
No strain which shamed his country's creaking lyre, 
That whetstone of the teeth — monotony in wire ! 

Peace to Torquato's injured shade! 'twas his '54 

In life and death to be the mark where Wrong 
Aim'd with her poison'd arrows, — but to miss. 
O victor unsurpass'd in modern song ! 
Each year brings forth its millions ; but how long 
The tide of generations shall roll on, 
And not the whole combined and countless throng 
Compose a mind like thine ! though all in one 
Condensed their scatter'd rays, they would not form a 
sun. 

Great as thou art, yet parallel'd by those, l6 * 

Thy countrymen, before thee born to shine, 



Cruscan academy who sought to degrade Tasso. 
French critic, — he speaks of " le clinquant du Tasse.' 



3 6 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

The Bards of Hell 25 and Chivalry : 26 first rose 
The Tuscan father's Comedy Divine; 
Then, not unequal to the Florentine, 
The southern Scott, 27 the minstrel who call'd forth 
A new creation with his magic line, 
And, like the Ariosto 28 of the North, 
Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly worth. 

The lightning rent 29 from Ariosto's bust I72 

The iron crown of laurel's mimick'd leaves ; 
Nor was the ominous element unjust, 
For the true laurel-wreath which Glory weaves 
Is of the tree no bolt of thunder cleaves, 
And the false semblance but disgraced his brow : 
Yet still, if fondly Superstition grieves, 
Know that the lightning sanctifies below 
Whate'er it strikes ; — yon head is doubly sacred now. 

Italia! O Italia! thou who hast l8t 

The fatal gift of beauty, which became 
A funeral dower of present woes and past, 
On thy sweet brow is sorrow plough'd by shame, 
And annals graved in characters of flame. 
O God ! that thou wert in thy nakedness 
Less lovely or more powerful, and couldst claim 
Thy right, and awe the robbers back who press 
To shed thy blood and drink the tears of thy distress ! 

Yet, Italy, through every other land I9 ° 



25 Dante. 29 Ariosto. 

27 Ariosto. 

28 Sir Walter Scott. 

20 An actual happening. 



LORD BYRON 37 

Thy wrongs should ring, and shall, from side to side ! 
Mother of Arts, as once of arms, thy hand 
Was then our guardian, and is still our guide! 
Parent 30 of our Religion, whom the wide 
Nations have knelt to for the keys of heaven ! 
Europe repentant of her parricide, 
Shall yet redeem thee, and, all backward driven, 
Roll the barbarian tide, and sue to be forgiven. 

But Arno wins us to the fair white walls I99 

Where the Etrurian Athens 31 claims and keeps 
A softer feeling for her fairy halls. 
Girt by her theater of hills, she reaps 
Her corn and wine and oil, and Plenty leaps 
To laughing life with her redundant horn. 32 
Along the banks where smiling Arno sweeps 
Was modern Luxury of Commerce born, 
And buried Learning rose, redeem'd to a new morn. 

There, too, the Goddess 33 loves in stone, and fills 2o8 
The air with beauty ; we inhale 
The ambrosial aspect, which, beheld, instills 
Part of its immortality ; the veil 
Of heaven is half undrawn ; within the pale 
We stand, and in that 'form and face behold 
What Mind can make when Nature's self would fail, 
And to the fond idolators of old 
Envy the innate flash which such a soul could mold. 



30 " Papa caput ecclesice est." 

31 Florence. 

z ~ Cornucopia. 

33 Venus de Medici. 



3 8 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

In Santa Croce's 34 holy precincts lie 2I 7 

Ashes which make it holier, dust which is 
Even in itself an immortality, 
Tho' there were nothing save the past, and this, 
The particle of those sublimities 
Which have relapsed to chaos : here repose 
Angelo's, 35 Alfieri's 36 bones, and his, 
The starry Galileo, 37 with his woes ; 
Here Machiavelli's 38 earth return'd to whence it rose. 

These are four minds, which, like the elements, 226 

Might furnish forth creation. — ■ Italy ! 

Time, which hath wrong'd thee with ten thousand 

rents 
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny, 
And hath denied, to every other sky, 
Spirits which soar from ruin : thy decay 
Is still impregnate with divinity, 
Which gilds it with revivifying ray ; 
Such as the great of yore, Canova 39 is to-day. 

But where repose the all-Etruscan three — 35 

Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, 
The Bard 40 of Prose, creative spirit, he 
Of the Hundred Tales of love — where did they lay 



34 Holy Cross. 

35 The great painter, sculptor, and architect. 

30 " Alfieri is the great name of this age. The Italians, without 
waiting for the hundred years, consider him as a ' poet good in 
law.' " — Byron. 

37 The great Italian astronomer. 

38 A famous political writer whose name always suggests ways 
that are dark. 

39 An Italian sculptor then living. 

- 40 Boccaccio, in whose quarry Chaucer found so much to his 
hand. 



LORD BYRON 39 

Their bones, distinguish' d from our common clay- 
In death as life? Are they resolved to dust, 
And have their country's marbles 41 nought to say ? 
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? 
Did they not to her breast their filial earth intrust? 

Ungrateful Florence ! Dante sleeps afar, 42 244 

Like Scipio, 43 buried by the upbraiding shore : 
Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, 
Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore 
Their children's children would in vain adore 
With the remorse of ages ; and the crown 
Which Petrarch's laureate-brow supremely wore, 
Upon a far and foreign soil had grown ; 
His life, his fame, his grave, — though rifled — not 
thine own. 

Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed 253 

His dust, — and lies it not her Great among, 
With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed 
O'er him who form'd the Tuscan's siren tongue, 
That music in itself, whose sounds are song, 
The poetry of speech ? No ; even his tomb, 
Uptorn, must bear the hyena bigot's wrong, 
No more amidst the meaner dead find room, 
Nor claim a passing sigh 44 because it told for whom ! 



41 Statues. 

4 " See line 266. 

43 " The elder Scipio Africanus had a tomb, if he was not buried 
at Liternum, whither he had retired to voluntary banishment. This 
tomb was near the seashore, and the story of an inscription upon it, 
Ingrata Patria, is, if not true, at least an agreeable fiction." — Byron. 

44 ~" Implores the passing tribute of a sigh." — Gray's Elegy. 



40 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust; 262 

Yet for this want more noted, as of yore 
The Caesar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust, 
Did but of Rome's best son remind her more : 
Happier Ravenna ! on thy hoary shore, 
Fortress of falling empire, honor'd sleeps 
The immortal exile ; — Arqua, too, her store 
Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, 
While Florence vainly begs her banish'd dead, and 
weeps. 

There be more things to greet the heart and eyes 271 
In Arno's dome of Art's most princely shrine, 
Where Sculpture with her rainbow sister vies ; 
There be more marvels yet — but not for mine; 
For I have been accustom'd to entwine 
My thoughts with Nature, rather in the fields 
Than Art in galleries ; though a work divine 
Calls for my spirit's homage, yet it yields 
Less than it feels, because the weapon which it wields 

Is of another temper, and I roam 2 7° 

By Thrasimene's lake, in the defiles 
Fatal to Roman rashness, more at home; 
For there the Carthaginian's 45 warlike wiles 
Come back before me, as his skill beguiles 
The host between the mountains and the shore, 
Where Courage falls in her despairing files, 
And torrents, swoln to rivers with their gore, 
Reek thro' the sultry plain, with legions scatter'd o'er. 



45 " Near Thrasimene tradition is still faithful to the name of an 
enemy, and Hannibal the Carthaginian is the only ancient name re- 
membered." — Byron. 



LORD BYRON 41 

Like to a forest fell'd by mountain winds ; 28 9 

And such the storm of battle on this day, 
And such the frenzy, whose convulsion blinds 
To all save carnage, that, beneath the fray, 
An earthquake reel'd unheededly away ! 46 
None felt stern Nature rocking at his feet, 
And yawning forth a grave for those who lay 
Upon their bucklers for a winding-sheet ; 
Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet ! 

The Earth to them was as a rolling bark 298 

Which bore them to Eternity; they saw 
The Ocean round, but had no time to mark 
The motions of their vessel ; Nature's law, 
In them suspended, reck'd not of the awe 
Which reigns when mountains tremble, and the birds 
Plunge in the clouds for refuge and withdraw 
From their down-toppling nests, and bellowing herds 
Stumble o'er heaving plains, and man's dread hath no 
words. 

Far other scene is Thrasimene now ; 3 ° 7 

Her lake a sheet of silver, and her plain 
Rent by no ravage save the gentle plough ; 
Her aged trees rise thick as once the slain 
Lay where their roots are ; but a brook hath ta'en — 
A little rill of scanty stream and bed — 
A name of blood from that day's sanguine rain ; 
And Sanguinetto 4T tells ye where the dead 
Made the earth wet, and turn'd the unwilling waters 
red. 



40 History so says. 

47 Defined in the context. 



42 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

But thou, Clitumnus, in thy sweetest wave 3l6 

Of the most living crystal that was e'er 
The haunt of river nymph, to gaze and lave 
Her limbs where nothing hid them, thou dost rear 
Thy grassy banks whereon the milk-white steer 
Grazes; the purest god of gentle waters, 
And most serene of aspect, and most clear ! 
Surely that stream was unprofaned by slaughters, 
A mirror and a bath for Beauty's youngest daughters. 

And on thy happy shore a Temple still, 325 

Of small and delicate proportion, keeps, 
Upon a mild declivity of hill, 
Its memory of thee ; beneath it sweeps 
Thy current's calmness ; oft from out it leaps 
The finny darter with the glittering scales, 
Who dwells and revels in thy glassy deeps ; 
While, chance, some scatter'd water-lily sails 
Down where the shallower 4S wave still tells its bub- 
bling tales. 

Pass not unblest the Genius of the place! 3:4 

If through the air a zephyr more serene 
Win 48a to the brow, 'tis his; and if ye trace / 
Along his margin a more eloquent green, 
If on the heart the freshness of the scene 
Sprinkle its coolness, and from the dry dust 
Of weary life a moment lave it clean 
With Nature's baptism, — 'tis to him ye must 
Pay orisons for this suspension of disgust. 



43 " The shallows murmur, while the deeps are dumb." 
48a reach, attain : " When we win to the greater light, we may 
see with different eyes." — W . Black. 



LORD BYRON 43 

The roar of waters ! — from the headlong height 343 
Velino cleaves the wave-worn precipice ; 
The fall of waters ! rapid as the light, 
The flashing mass foams shaking the abyss ; 
The hell of waters ! where they howl and hiss, 
And boil in endless torture ; while the sweat 
Of their great agony, wrung out from this 
Their Phlegethon, 40 curls round the rocks of jet 
That gird the gulf around, in pitiless horror set, 

And mounts in sprays the skies, and thence again 3S2 

Returns in an unceasing shower, which round, 

With its unemptied cloud of gentle rain, 

In an eternal April to the ground, 

Making it all one emerald : — how profound 

The gulf ! and how the giant element 

• From rock to rock leaps with delirious bound, 
Crushing the cliffs, which, downward worn and rent 

With his fierce footsteps, yield in chasms a fearful vent 

To the broad column which rolls on, and shows 36: 
More like the fountain of an infant sea 
Torn from the womb of mountains by the throes 
Of a new world, than only thus to be 
Parent of rivers, which flow gushingly, 
With many windings, thro' the vale ! — Look back ! 
Lo, where it comes like an eternity, 
As if to sweep down all things in its track, 
Charming the eye with dread, — a matchless cataract, 

Horribly beautiful ! but on the verge, 37 ° 

From side to side, beneath the glittering morn, 



'"A river in the lower regions. 



44 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

An Iris 50 sits, amidst the infernal surge, 
Like Hope upon a death-bed, and, unworn 
Its steady dyes while all around is torn 
By the distracted waters, bears serene 
Its brilliant hues with all their beams unshorn: 
Resembling, mid the torture of the scene, 
Love watching Madness with unalterable mien. 

Once more upon the woody Apennine, 379 

The infant Alps, which — had I not before 
Gazed on their mightier parents, where the pine 
Sits on more shaggy summits, and where roar 
The thundering lauwine° — might be worship'd more; 
But I have seen the soaring Jungfrau rear 
Her never-trodden snow, and seen the hoar 
Glaciers of bleak Mont Blanc 51 both far and near, 
And in Chimari 51 heard the thunder-hills of fear — 

Th' Acroceraunian 51 mountains of old name ; 388 

And on Parnassus seen the eagles fly 
Like spirits of the spot, as 't were for fame, 
For still they soar'd unutterably high : 
I've looked on Ida 52 with a Trojan's eye; 
Athos, Olympus, ./Etna, Atlas, made 
These hills seem things of lesser dignity, 
All, save the lone Soracte's height,, display'd 
Not now in snow, which asks the lyric Roman's 53 aid 

For our remembrance, and from out the plain 397 
Heaves like a long-swept wave about to break, 






eo rainbow. 

61 Watch the meter and pronunciation. 

Ba A mountain near Troy. 

83 Horace. 



LORD BYRON 45 

And on the curl hangs pausing. 54 Not in vain 
May he, who will, his recollections rake, 
And quote in classic raptures, and awake 
The hills with Latian echoes: I abhorr'd 
Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake, 
The drill'd dull lesson, forced down word by word 
In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record 

Aught that recalls the daily drug which turn'd 4 ° 6 
My sickening memory ; and, though Time hath taught 
My mind to meditate what then it learn'd, 
Yet such the fix'd inveteracy wrought 
By the impatience of my early thought, 
That, with the freshness wearing out before 
My mind could relish what it might have sought, 
If free to choose, I cannot now restore 
Its health, but what it then detested still abhor. 

Then farewell, 55 Horace, whom I hated so, 4IS 

Not for thy faults, but mine ; it is a curse 

To understand, not feel, thy lyric flow — 

To comprehend, but never love, thy verse ; 

Although no deeper Moralist rehearse 

Our little life, nor Bard prescribe his art, 

Nor livelier Satirist the conscience pierce, 



M " For beauty's acme hath a term as brief 

As the wave's poise before it breaks in pearl." 

— Lowell. 
K " I wish to express that we become tired of the task before 
we can comprehend the beauty ; . . . I was not a slow, though an 
idle, boy ; my preceptor was the best and worthiest friend I ever 
possessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though 
too late — when I have erred, and whose counsels I have but fol- 
lowed when I have done well or wisely." — Byron. 



46 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Awakening without wounding the touch'd heart, 
Yet fare thee well — upon Soracte's ridge we part. 

Sylla was first of victors ; but our own, 424 

The sagest of usurpers, Cromwell, 56 — he 
Too swept off senates while he hew'd the throne 
Down to a block — immortal rebel ! See 
What crimes it costs to be a moment free, 
And famous through all ages ! but beneath 
His fate the moral lurks of destiny ; 
His day of double 5T victory and death 
Beheld him win two 58 realms, and, happier, yield his 
breath. 

Oh ! Rome my country, city of the soul ! 433 

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, 
Lone mother of dead empires ! and control 
In their shut breasts their petty misery. 
What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see 
The cypress, hear the owl and plod your way 
O'er steps of broken thrones and temples. Ye ! 
Whose agonies are evils of a day — 
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay. 

The Niobe 59 of nations ! there she stands, 442 



B0 " Cromwell was a usurper ; and in many points there may be 
found a resemblance between him and the present chief consul." 
— Fox. 

57 Cromwell died on September 3d, the anniversary of his two 
great victories of Worcester and Dunbar. 

58 England and Scotland. 

50 She offended Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana, and for 
vengeance' sake Diana (Artemis) shot to death all her sons and 
daughters. 



LORD BYRON 47 

Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe 
An empty urn within her withered hands, 
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago ; 
The Scipio's G0 tomb contains no ashes now ; 
The very sepulchers lie tenantless 
Of their heroic dwellers : dost thou flow, 
Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? 
Rise, with thy yellow waves and mantle her distress. 

Alas! the lofty city! and alas! 4SI 

The trebly hundred triumphs ! and the day 
When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass 
The Conqueror's sword in bearing fame away ! 
Alas ! for Tally's voice, and Virgil's lay, 
And Livy's pictured page ! — but these shall be 
Her resurrection ; all beside — decay. 
Alas, for earth, for never shall we see 
That brightness in her eye she bore when Rome was 
free! 

What from this barren being do we reap? 46 ° 

Our senses narrow, and our reason frail, 

Life short, and truth a gem which loves the deep, 01 

And all things weigh'd in custom's falsest scale ; 

Opinion an omnipotence, — whose veil 

Mantles the earth with darkness, until right 

And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale 



"Amid nine daughters slain by Artemis 
Stood Niobe. . . . 

One prayer remains 
For me to offer yet. Thy quiver holds 
More than nine arrows ; bend the bow ; aim here ! " 
" u See note to line 245. 
81 " Truth lies in a well." 



48 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Lest their own judgments should become too bright, 
And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too 
much light. 

I speak not of men's creeds — they rest between 469 
Man and his Maker — but of things allow'd, 
Averr'd, and known, and daily, hourly seen — 
The yoke that is upon us doubly bow'd, 
And the intent of tyranny avow'd., 
The edict of Earth's rulers, who are grown 
The apes of him 62 who humbled once the proud, 
And shook them from their slumbers on the throne ; 
Too glorious, were this all his mighty arm had done. 

Can tyrants but by tyrants conquer'd be, 478 

And Freedom find no champion and no child 
Such as Columbia saw arise when she 
Sprung forth a Pallas, 63 arm'd and undefiled ? 
Or must such minds be nourish'd in the wild, 
Deep in the unpruned forest, 6 * 'midst the roar 
Of cataracts, where nursing Nature smiled 
On infant Washington ? Has Earth no more 
Such seeds within her breast, 65 or Europe no such 
shore ? 



02 Napoleon. 

63 Minerva, or Pallas, sprang forth full-armed from the brain of 
Jupiter. 

04 Byron forgets that Virginia was settled over a hundred years 
before Washington was born. 

66 Lowell thought the supply not out : — 

" For him her Old-World molds aside she threw, 
And, choosing sweet clay from the breast 
Of the unexhausted West, 
With stuff untainted shaped a hero new." 
Who was this hero ? 



LORD BYRON 49 

There is the moral of all human tales ; 487 

'Tis but the same rehearsal of the past : 
First Freedom, and then Glory, — when that fails, 
Wealth, vice, corruption, — Barbarism at last : 
And History, with all her volumes vast, 
Hath but one page, — 'tis better written here, 
Where gorgeous Tyranny hath thus amass'd 
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear, 
Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask ; — away with 
words ! draw near, 

Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, — for here 496 
There is such matter for all feeling. — Man, 
Thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear! 
Ages and realms are crowded in this span, 
This mountain, whose obliterated plan 
The pyramid of empires pinnacled, 
Of Glory's gewgaws shining in the van 
Till the sun's rays with added flame were fiU'd ! 
Where are its golden roofs ! where those who dared to 
build? 

Tully was not so eloquent as thou, s ° 5 

Thou nameless column with the buried base ! 
What are the laurels of the Caesar's brow ? 
Crown me with ivy from his dwelling-place! 
Whose arch or pillar meets me in the face, 
Titus' or Trajan's ? No — 'tis that of Time : 
Triumph, arch, pillar, all he doth displace 
Scoffing ; and apostolic statues G0 climb 
To crush the imperial urn, whose ashes slept sublime, 



00 The Column of Trajan is surmounted by St. Peter, that of 
Aurelius by St. Paul. — Bytion. 



5 o CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Buried in air, the deep-blue sky of Rome, 514 

And looking to the stars : they had contain'd 
A spirit which with these would find a home, 
The last of those who o'er the whole earth reign'd, 
The Roman globe, for after none sustain'd, 
But yielded back his conquests : — he was more 
Than a mere Alexander, and, unstain'd 
With household blood and wine, serenely wore 
His sovereign virtues — still we Trajan's 67 name adore. 

Where is the rock of Triumph, the high place 523 
Where Rome embraced her heroes? where the steep 
Tarpeian — fittest goal of Treason's race, 
The promontory whence the Traitor's Leap 
Cured all ambition? Did the conquerors heap 
Their spoils here ? Yes ; and in yon field below, 
A thousand years of silenced factions sleep, — 
The Forum, where the immortal accents glow, 
And still the eloquent air breathes — burns with Cicero ! 

Then turn we to her latest tribune's name, — S32 

From her ten thousand tyrants, turn to thee, 

Redeemer of dark centuries of shame — 

The friend of Petrarch — hope of Italy — 

Rienzi, 68 last of Romans ! While the tree 

Of Freedom's wither'd trunk puts forth a leaf, 

Even for thy tomb a garland let it be — 



07 Proverbially the best of the Roman emperors. " Even down 
to our age one is not applauded among the chief statesmen in the 
Senate, except, ' More glorious than Augustus, better than Trajan.' " 
— Entropius's Short History of Rome. 

68 Who " came not here to talk." 



LORD BYRON 51 

The forum's champion, and the people's chief, — 
Her new-born Numa thou — with reign, alas ! too brief. 

O Love, no habitant of earth thou art! S41 

An unseen seraph, we believe in thee, — 
A faith whose martyrs are the broken heart; 
But never yet hath seen nor e'er shall see 
The naked eye thy form, as it should be ; 
The mind hath made thee, as it peopled heaven, 
Even with its own desiring phantasy, 
And to a thought such shape and image given 
As haunts the unquench'd soul — parch'd, wearied, 
wrung, and riven. 

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased, 55 ° 

And fevers into false creation. Where, 
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized? 
In him alone. 69 Can Nature show so fair? 
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare 
Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men, — 
The unreach'd Paradise of our despair, 
Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen, 
And overpowers the page where it would bloom again ? 

Our life is a false nature, — 'tis not in 559 

The harmony of things — this hard decree, 

This uneradicable taint of sin, 

This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree, 

Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be 



" The light that never was on sea or land, 
The consecration and the poet's dream," 

— Wordsworth. 



52 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

The skies which rain their plagues on men like 

dew — 
Disease, death, bondage — all the woes we see — 
And worse, the woes we see not — which throb 
through 
The immedicable soul, with heart-aches ever new. 

Yet let us ponder boldly: 'tis a base s68 

Abandonment of reason to resign 
Our right of thought — our last and only place 
Of refuge; this, at least, shall still be mine: 
Though from our birth the faculty divine 
Is chain'd and tortured — cabin'd, cribb'd, confined, 
And bred in darkness, lest the truth should shine 
Too brightly on the unprepared mind, 
The beam pours in, for time and skill will couch the 
blind. 

Arches on arches! as it were that Rome, S77 

Collecting the chief trophies of her line, 
Would build up all her triumphs in one dome, 
Her Coliseum stands ; the moonbeams shine 
As 't were, its natural torches, 70 for divine 
Should be the light which streams here to illume 
This long-explored but still exhaustless mine 
Of contemplation ; and the azure gloom 
Of an Italian night, where the deep skies assume 



70 " Byron's celebrated description is better than the reality. He 
beheld the scene in his mind's eye, through the witchery of many 
intervening years, and faintly illuminated it as if with starlight 
instead of this broad glow of moonshine." — Hawthorne. The Mar- 
ble Faun people visited the ruin when the moonlight " filled and 
flooded the great empty space." 



LORD BYRON 53 

Hue9 which have words and speak to ye of heaven,s 86 
Floats o'er this vast and wondrous monument, 
And shadows forth its glory. There is given 
Unto the things of earth, which Time hath bent, 
A spirit's feeling; and where he hath leant 
His hand, but broke his scythe, 71 there is a power 
And magic in the ruin'd battlement, 
For which the palace of the present hour 
Must yield its pomp and wait till ages are its dower. 72 

I see before me the Gladiator lie : S95 

He leans upon his hand — his manly brow 
Consents to death, but conquers agony, 
And his droop'd head sinks gradually low, — 
And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow 
From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, 
Like the first of a thunder-shower ; and now 
The arena swims around him — he is gone, 
Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch 
who won. 

He heard it, but he heeded not : his eyes 6 ° 4 

Were with his heart, and that was far away; 
He reck'd not of the life he lost, nor prize, 
But where his rude hut by the Danube lay 
There were his young barbarians all at play, 
There was their Dacian mother ; — he, their sire, 
Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday, — 
All this rush'd with his blood. — Shall he expire? 
And unavenged ? — Arise, ye Goths, and glut your ire ! 



T1 The object has grown old, but is not destroyed. 
72 Modern works of art must wait for their halo till Time has 
adopted them. 



54 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

A ruin — yet what ruin! from its mass 6l3 

Walls, palaces, half-cities, have been rear'd ; 
Yet oft the enormous skeleton 73 ye pass, 
And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd. 
Hath it indeed been plunder'd, or but clear'd ? 
Alas ! developed, opens the decay, 
When the colossal fabric's form is near'd ; 
It will not bear the brightness of the day, 
Which streams too much on all years, man, have reft 
away. 

But when the rising moon begins to climb 622 

Its topmost arch, and gently pauses 74 there ; 
When the stars twinkle through the loops of time, 
And the low night-breeze waves along the air 
The garland-forest, 75 which the gray walls wear, 
Like laurels on the bald first Caesar's head ; 
When the light shines serene but doth not glare, 
Then in this magic circle raise the dead : 
Heroes have trod this spot — 'tis on their dust ye tread. 

"While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; 6 ^ 

When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall ; 

And when Rome falls — the World." From our 

own land 75a 
Thus spake the pilgrims o'er this mighty wall 



73 The Coliseum. 

74 " Hast thou a charm to stay the morning star 
In his steep course? So long he seems to pause 
On thy bald awful head, O sovran Blanc ! " — Coleridge. 
75 Vines, etc., growing from the walls — 

" Mere withered wallflowers, waving overhead." 

— Browning's Pippa Passes. 
75 a Read interesting note in Gibbon's Rome. See index. 



LORD BYRON 55 

In Saxon times, which we are wont to call 
Ancient; and these three mortal things are still 
On their foundations, and unalter'd all ; 
Rome and her Ruin past Redemption's skill, 
The World, the same wide den — of thieves, or what 
ye will. 

But lo ! the dome — the vast and wondrous 64 ° 

dome, 70 
To which Diana's marvel 7T was a cell, — 
Christ's mighty shrine above his martyr's tomb ! 
I have beheld the Ephesian's miracle — 
Its columns strew the wilderness, and dwell 
The hyena and the jackal in their shade ; 
I have beheld Sophia's 78 bright roofs swell 
Their glittering mass i' the sun, and have survey'd 
Its sanctuary the while the usurping Moslem pray'd ; 

But thou, of temples old or altars new, 649 

Standest alone, with nothing like to thee — 

Worthiest of God, the holy and the true. 

Since Zion's desolation, when that He 

Forsook his former city, 79 what could be 

Of earthly structures, in his honor piled, 

Of a sublimer aspect? Majesty, 



76 Of St. Peter's. 

77 The Temple of Diana at Ephesus. 

78 Temple, now a mosque, built by Constantine on the occasion 
of removing the seat of government from Rome to Byzantine. Now, 

" In St. Sophia the Turkman gets, 
And loud in air 
Calls men to prayer 

From the tapering summits of tall minarets." 
— Father Prout. 
7 " Jerusalem. 



56 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Power, Glory, Strength, and Beauty, all are aisled 80 
In this eternal ark of worship undefiled. 

Enter: its grandeur overwhelms thee not; 6s8 

And why ? it is not lessen'd ; but thy mind, 
Expanded by the genius of the spot, 
Has grown colossal, and can only find 
A fit abode wherein appear enshrined 
Thy hopes of immortality ; and thou 
Shalt one day, if found worthy, so defined, 
See thy God face to face, as thou dost now 
His Holy of Holies, nor be blasted by his brow. 

Thou movest — but increasing with the advance, 667 

Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise, 

Deceived by its gigantic elegance ; 

Vastness which grows — but grows to harmonize — 

All musical in its immensities ; 

Rich marbles — richer painting — shrines where 

flame 
The lamps of gold — and haughty dome which vies 
In air with Earth's chief structures, tho' their frame 
Sits on the firm-set 81 ground — and this the clouds 

must claim. 

Thou seest not all ; but piecemeal thou must break, 6 ? 6 
To separate contemplation, the great whole; 
And as the ocean many bays will make 



' An architectural term, — or, is it " isled " ? 
" Isled in sudden seas of light, 
My heart," etc. — Tennyson. 

" Thou sure and firm-set earth, 
Hear not my steps, which way they walk." 

— Macbeth, Act II, Scene I. 



LORD BYRON 57 

That ask the eye, so here condense thy soul 
To more immediate objects, and control 
Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart 
Its eloquent proportions;, and unroll 
In mighty graduations, part by part, 
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart, 

Not by its fault — but thine : our outward sense 68s 
Is but of gradual grasp — and as it is 
That what we have of feeling most intense 
Outstrips our faint expression, even so this 
Outshining and o'erwhelming edifice 82 
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great 
Defies at first our nature's littleness, 
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate 
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate. 

Then pause, and be enlighten'd; there is more 694 
In such a survey than the sating gaze 
Of wonder pleased, or awe which would adore 
The worship of the place, or the mere praise 
Of art and its great masters, who could raise 
What former time, nor skill nor thought could plan : 
The fountain of sublimity displays 
Its depth, and thence may draw the mind of man 
Its golden sands, and learn what great conceptions can. 



Looking up suddenly, I found mine eyes 
Confronted with the minster's vast repose. 

I entered, reverent of whatever shrine 

Guards piety and solace for my kind 

Or gives the soul a moment's truce of God." 

— Lowell's The Cathedral. 



58 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

But where is he, the Pilgrim 83 of my song, 7°'3 

The being who upheld it through the past? — 
Methinks he cometh late and tarries long. 
He is no more — these breathings are his last ; 
His wanderings done, his visions ebbing fast, 
And he himself as nothing : — if he was 
Aught but a phantasy, and could be class'd 
With forms which live and suffer — let that pass ; 
His shadow fades away into Destruction's mass, 

Which gathers shadow, substance, life, and all 7I2 
That we inherit 84 in its mortal shroud, 
And spreads the dim and universal pall 
Through which all things grow phantom ; and the 

cloud 
Between us sinks and all which ever glow'd, 
Till Glory's self is twilight, and displays 
A melancholy halo scarce allow'd 
To hover on the verge of darkness ; rays 
Sadder than saddest night, for they distract the gaze, 

And send us prying into the abyss, 721 

To gather what we shall be when the frame 
Shall be resolved to something less than this 
Its wretched essence ; and to dream of fame, 
And wipe the dust from off the idle name 
We never more shall hear, — but never more, 
O happier thought ! can we be made the same : 
It is enough, in sooth, that once we bore 



83 Childe Harold. 

84 " The solemn tempies, the great globe itself, 

Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve." 

-rv Prospero, in The Tempest. 



LORD BYRON 59 

These fardels of the heart — the heart whose sweat 
was gore. 

Lo ! Nemi, 85 navell'd in the woody hills 73 ° 

So far that the uprooting wind which tears, 
The oak from his foundation, and which spills 
The ocean o'er its boundary and bears 
Its foam against the skies, reluctant spares 
The oval mirror of thy glassy lake ; 
And, calm as cherish'd hate, its surface wears 
A deep cold settled aspect nought can shake, 
All coil'd into itself and round, as sleeps the snake. 

And near, Albano's 86 scarce-divided waves 739 

Shine from a sister valley ; — and afar, 
The Tiber winds, and the broad ocean laves 
The Latian coast where sprung the Epic S7 war, 
" Arms and the Man," whose reascending star 
Rose o'er an empire ; — but beneath thy right 
Tully 88 reposed from Rome ; — and where yon bar 
Of girdling mountains intercepts the sight 
The Sabine farm was till'd, the weary bard's 89 delight. 

But I forget, — My pilgrim's shrine is won, 748 

And he and I must part,— so let it be, — 
His task and mine alike are nearly done : 



85 From Nemus, a forest. "The village of Nemi (the Grove) 
is but an evening's ride from the comfortable inn of Albano." — 
Byron. 

80 A small lake in the Alban hill. From the summit of this, " the 
prospect embraces all the objects alluded to in the stanza." — Byron. 

87 A war whose burden is the two great epic poems of Greece 
and Rome. 

88 Cicero. 89 Virgil. 



60 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Yet once more let us look upon the sea; 
The Midland Ocean breaks on him and me, 
And from the Alban Mount we now behold 
Our friend of youth, that ocean which when we 
Beheld it last by Calpe's 90 rock unfold 
Those waves, we follow'd on till the dark Euxine roll'd 

Upon the blue Symplegades : 91 long years — 757 
Long, though not very many — since have done 
Their work on both; some suffering and some tears 
Have left us nearly where we had begun. 
Yet not in vain our mortal race hath run ; 
We have had our reward — and it is here : 
That we can yet feel gladden'd by the sun, 
And reap from earth, sea, joy almost as dear 
As if there were no man to trouble what is clear. 92 

Oh, that the Desert were my dwelling-place, 93 766 
With one fair Spirit for my minister, 
That I might all forget the human race, 
And hating no one, love but only her ! 
Ye Elements ! — in whose ennobling stir 
I feel myself exalted — can ye not 
Accord me such a being ? Do I err 
In deeming such inhabit many a spot? 
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot. 

There 94 is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 775 



90 Strait of Gibraltar. 

91 Small islands at the mouth of the Bosporus. 

92 A " reward," verily. 

93 " Oh, for a lodge in some vast wilderness ! " — Cowper. 
94 Will not the reader favor himself by memorizing these conclud- 
ing stanzas? 



LORD BYRON 61 

There is a rapture on the lonely shore ; 
There is society, where none intrudes, 
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar : 
I love not Man the less, but Nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, 95 and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal. 

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean — roll ! 784 
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain : 
Man marks the earth with ruin — his control 
Stops with the shore ; — upon the watery plain 
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain 
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own, 
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain, 
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan, 
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown. 

His steps are not upon thy paths, — thy fields 793 
Are not a spoil for him, — thou dost arise 
And shake him from thee ; the vile strength he wields 
For earth's destruction, thou dost all despise, 
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies, 
And send'st him, shivering in thy playful spray, 
And howling, to his gods, where haply lies 
His petty hope in some near port or bay, 
And dashest him again to earth : — there let him lay. 98 

The armaments which thunderstrike the walls 8o2 



05 " He is made one with Nature," etc. — Adonais, line 370, et seq. 
"""Nice customs curtsy to great kings." — H£nry V., Act V, 
Scene 1, line 240. 



62 CHILDE HAROLD'S PILGRIMAGE 

Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake, 
And monarchs tremble in their capitals, — 
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make 
Their clay creator the vain title take 
Of lord of thee and arbiter of war, — 
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake, 
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar 
Alike the Armada's 97 pride or spoils of Trafalgar. 98 

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save 8l1 

thee ; — 
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they? 
Thy waters wash'd them power while they were free, 
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey 
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay 
Has dried up realms to deserts : — not so thou ; 
Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play, 
Time writes no wrinkle on thine azure brow: 
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now. 

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form 820 
Glasses itself in tempests ; in all time, 
Calm or convulsed — in breeze, or gale, or storm, 
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime 
Dark-heaving ; — boundless, endless, and sublime, 
The image of Eternity, the throne 
Of the Invisible ; even from out thy slime 
The monsters of the deep are made ; each zone 
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone. 



97 The Spanish Armada, destroyed by the English fleet, with the 
efficient aid of Neptune. 

98 One of Nelson's great naval victories. 



LORD BYRON 63 

And I have loved thee, Ocean ! and my joy 82 9 

Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be 
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward : from a boy 
I wanton'd with thy breakers — they to me 
Were a delight ; and if the freshening sea 
Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear, 
For I was as it were a child of thee, 
And trusted to thy billows far and near, 
And laid my hand upon thy mane — as I do here. 

My task is done — my song hath ceased — my 83S 

theme 
Has died into an echo ; it is fit 
The spell should break of this protracted dream. 
The torch shall be extinguished which hath lit 
My midnight lamp — and what is writ, is writ ; — 
Would it were worthier ! but I am not now 
That which I have been — and my visions flit 
Less palpably before me — and the glow 
Which in my spirit dwelt is fluttering, faint, and low. 

Farewell ! a word that must be, and hath been, — 8 47 
A sound which makes us linger, — yet — farewell ! 
Ye who have traced the Pilgrim to the scene 
Which is his last, if in your memories dwell 
A thought which once was his, if on ye swell 
A single recollection, not in vain 
He wore his sandal-shoon and scallop-shell ; " 
Farewell ! with him alone may rest the pain, 
If such there were, — with you, the moral of his strain! 



Badges of pilgrims. 

" How should I your true love know 
From another oon ? 
By his cockle hat and staff, 
And his sandle shoon." 

— Hamlet, Act IV, Scene 5. 




DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON. 
1 709-1 784. 

Throughout that part of our globe where English is 
the mother tongue there are probably not more than a 
half dozen names of what we may call literary people 
more generally known than is the name, Dr. Johnson; 
and this fame, for it is fame of a pure and noble type, 
is not based upon wealth, high descent, well-improved 
opportunities to play a brilliant part in the public eye, 
but upon his simple mode of life in the light of common 
day, upon his writings, and pre-eminently upon his talk. 

Possibly, nay certainly, one book written about John- 
son, what he did, what he said ; sometimes, when they 
had a chance, what others in his presence said, has done 
more to fix and widen that reputation than any book of 
his own authorship. Critics have dipped deep into their 
stock of laudatory phrases when speaking of Boswell's 
Life of Johnson. " Johnson," said Burke, " appears far 
greater in Boswell's books than in his own." 

Among his prose works are the Rambler, a periodical 
upon the general plan of Addison's Spectator; Rasselas, 
a story which he wrote in one week to obtain money to 
pay the burial expenses of his mother ; a Dictionary of 
the English Language, first published in 1755, relative 
to which Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield, prompted 
by a patronizing article of his lordship, has been termed 
" English literature's declaration of independence ; " The 
Lives of the Poets, a series of biographies of exceeding 
interest, abounding in sterling literary criticism, but amid 
the current thereof the reader may well reserve the right 
5 6 5 



66 DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 

Of private opinion ; an edition of Shakespeare's Plays ; 
Reports of the Senate of Lilliput, otherwise reports of 
many of the great speeches in Parliament by Pitt and 
others, which are said to be largely in debt to the re- 
porter ; and A Journey to the Hebrides, concerning which 
there is a note in the introduction to this volume. 

Though his muse did not soar, Johnson wrote some 
poems. One of these, the Vanity of Human Wishes, 
has furnished the language one of its well-worn phrases. 
Of Charles XII. of Sweden it says, likewise ending the 
poem : — 

He left a name at which the worlJ grew pale, 
To point a moral, or adorn a tale. 

Familiarly associated with Johnson were Garrick, 
Reynolds, Boswell, Burke, Goldsmith, and others, names 
familiar to our ears as household words, members of 
the renowned "Literary Club," and Johnson as of 
right divine at the head of the table. Here is the way 
the bare thought of one of those gatherings struck 
Thackeray : " How contemptible the story of the George 
III Court squabblers is beside the recorded talk of dear 
old Johnson ! Ah, I would have liked a night at the 
Turk's Head, even though bad news had arrived from 
the Colonies, and Dr. Johnson was growling against the 
rebels." And this note closes with a few words from 
Macaulay : " What a singular destiny has been that of 
this remarkable man ! To be regarded in his own age 
as a classic, and in ours as a companion — to receive from 
his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius 
have in general received only from posterity — to be 
more intimately known to posterity than other men are 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 67 

known to their contemporaries." This is followed by a 
prediction that " those peculiarities of manner, and that 
careless table-talk, the memory of which, he probably 
thought, would die with him, are likely to be remembered 
as lonj as the English language is spoken in any. quarter 
of the globe." 



A Journey to the Hebrides 

i I had desired to visit the Hebrides, or Western 
Islands of Scotland, so long, that I scarcely remember 
how the wish was originally excited ; and was in the 
autumn of the year 1773 induced to undertake the jour- 
ney, by finding in Mr. Boswell x a companion whose 
acuteness would help my inquiry, and whose gaiety of 
conversation and civility of manners are sufficient to 
counteract the inconveniences of travel in countries less 
hospitable than we have passed. 

2 On the eighteenth of August we left Edinburgh, a 
city too well known to admit description, and directed our 
course northward, along the eastern coast of Scotland, 
accompanied the first day by another gentleman, who 
could stay with us only long enough to show us how 
much we lost at separation. 

3 As we crossed the Frith of Forth, 2 our curiosity was 
attracted by — 

INCH 3 KEITH, 

a small island, which neither of my companions had ever 
visited, though, lying within their view, it had all their 
lives solicited their notice. Here, by climbing with some 
difficulty over shattered crags, we made the first experi- 
ment of unfrequented coasts. Inch Keith is nothing 
more than a rock covered with a thin layer of earth, not 
wholly bare of grass, and very fertile of thistles. A 



1 The author of one of the world's most famous biographies, 
Boswell's Life of Johnson. 

2 The reader should have a map of Scotland constantly at hand. 
:! an island. 

69 



70 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

small herd of cows grazes annually upon it in the sum- 
mer. It seems never to have afforded to man or beast 
a permanent habitation. 

4 We found only the ruins of a small fort, not so injured 
by time but that it might be easily restored to its former 
state. One of the stones had this inscription : 

Maria Reg. MDLXIV* 
It has probably been neglected from the time that the 
whole island had the same king. 5 

5 We left this little island with our thoughts employed 
a while on the different appearance that it would have 
made if it had been placed at the same distance from 
London, with the same facility of approach ; with' what 
emulation of price a few rocky acres would have been 
purchased, and with what expensive industry they would 
have been cultivated and adorned. 

6 Though we were yet in the most populous part of 
Scotland, and at so small a distance from the capital, we, 
met few passengers. 

The roads are neither rough nor dirty; and it affords 
a southern stranger a new kind of pleasure to travel so 
commodiously without the interruption of toll-gates. 
Where the bottom is rocky, as it seems commonly to be 
in Scotland, a smooth way is made indeed with great 
labor, but it never wants repair. The carriages in com- 
mon use are small carts, drawn each by one little horse; 
and a man seems to derive some degree of dignity and 
importance from the reputation of possessing a two- 
horse cart. 



4 Queen Mary, 1564 — " Mary Queen of Scots." 

5 James I., of England ; James VI., of Scotland. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 71 

ST. ANDREWS. 

7 At an hour somewhat late we came to St. Andrews, 
and found that, by the interposition of some invisible 
friend, lodgings had been provided for us at the house of 
one of the^professors, whose easy civility quickly made us 
forget that we were strangers; and in the whole time of 
our stay we were gratified by every mode of kindness, 
and entertained with all the elegance of lettered hos- 
pitality. 

8 In the morning we rose to perambulate a city which 
only history shows to have once flourished, and surveyed 
the ruins of ancient magnificence, of which even the 
ruins cannot long be visible, unless some care be taken 
to preserve them ; and where is the pleasure of preserving 
such mournful memorials? They have been till very 
lately so much neglected, that every man carried away 
the stones who fancied that he wanted them. 

9 The cathedral, of which the foundations may be still 
traced, and a small part of the wall is standing, appears 
to have been a spacious and majestic building, not un- 
suitable to the primacy of the kingdom. Of the archi- 
tecture, the poor remains can hardly exhibit, even to an 
artist, a sufficient specimen. It was demolished, as is 
well known, in the tumult and violence of Knox's 6 
reformation. 



9 The reader may need to be reminded of Johnson's intense 
prejudice against the Scotch reformation, and especially against its 
great leader, John Knox. I quote a few sentences from Froude's 
" The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish .Character," as 
a sort of antidote. " Good reason had Scotland to be proud of 
Knox. He only, in this wild crisis, saved the Kirk which he had 
founded, and saved with it Scottish and English freedom. But for 
Knox, and what he was able still to do, it is almost certain that the 
Duke of Alva's army would have landed on the eastern coast." 



72 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

10 The city of St. Andrews gradually decayed : one of 
its streets is now lost; and in those that remain there is 
the silence and solitude of inactive indigence and gloomy 
depopulation. 

The university, within a few years, consisted of three 
colleges, but is now reduced to two. The chapel of the 
alienated college is yet standing, a fabric not inelegant 
of external structure : but I was always, by some civil 
excuse, hindered from entering it. A decent attempt, as 
I was since told, has been made to convert it into a kind 
of greenhouse, by planting its area with shrubs. To 
what use it will next be put I have no pleasure in con- 
jecturing. It is something that its present state is at 
least not ostentatiously displayed. Where there is yet 
shame, there may in time be virtue. 
ii The dissolution of St. Leonard's College was doubt- 
less necessary ; but of that necessity there is reason to 
complain. It is surely not without just reproach, that a 
nation, of which the commerce is hourly extending, and 
the wealth increasing, denies any participation of its 
prosperity to its literary societies ; and while its mer- 
chants or its nobles are raising palaces, suffers its uni- 
versities to molder into dust. 

12 In walking among the ruins of these religious build- 
ings, we came to two vaults over which had formerly 
stood the house of the sub-prior. One of the vaults was 
inhabited by an old woman, who claimed the right of 
abode there as the widow of a man whose ancestors had 
possessed the same gloomy mansion for no less than four 
generations. The right, however it began, was considered 
as established by legal prescription, 7 and the old woman 

7 " The memory of man ran not to the contrary." 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 73 

lives undisturbed. She thinks, however, that she has a 
claim to something more than sufferance ; for as her hus- 
band's name was Bruce, 8 she is allied to royalty, and told 
Mr. Boswell that when there were persons of quality in 
the place, she was distinguished by some notice; that 
indeed she is now neglected, but she spins a thread, has 
the company of a cat, and is troublesome to nobody. 

13 Having now seen whatever this ancient city offered to 
our curiosity, we left it with good wishes, having reason 
to be highly pleased with the attention that was paid us. 
But whoever surveys the world must see many things 
that give him pain. 

ABERBROTHICK. 

14 As we knew sorrow and wishes to be vain, it was now 
our business to mind our way. The roads of Scotland 
afford little diversion to the traveler, who seldom sees 
himself either encountered or overtaken, and who has 
nothing to contemplate but grounds that have no visible 
boundaries, or are separated by walls of loose stone. 
From the banks of the Tweed to St. Andrews I had never 
seen a single tree which I did not believe to have grown 
up far within the present century. 9 Now and then about 
a gentleman's house stands a small plantation, which in 
Scotch is called a policy, but of these there are few, and 
those few all very young. The variety of sun and shade 
is here utterly unknown. There is no tree for either 
shelter or timber. A tree might be a show in Scotland, 



8 They claimed kin with the immortal Robert Bruce, once king. 

9 This calls up the depressing communication of Queen Elizabeth 
to the Scotch Council in that " wild crisis " (see note to 9), that 
if they hurt a hair of Queen Mary's head, she would harry their 
country, and hang them all on the trees round the town, if she could 
find any trees there for that purpose. 



74 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

as a horse in Venice. At St. Andrews Mr. Boswell found 
only one,, and recommended it to my notice; I told him 
that it was rough and low, and looked as if I thought so. 
" This," said he, " is nothing to another a few miles off." 
I was still less delighted to hear that another tree was 
not to be seen nearer. " Nay," said a gentleman that 
stood by, " I know but of this and that tree in the county." 

15 The lowlands of Scotland had once undoubtedly an 
equal portion of woods with other countries.' Forests 
are everywhere gradually diminished, as architecture and 
cultivation prevail by the increase of people and the in- 
troduction of arts. But I believe few regions have been 
denuded like this, where many centuries must have passed 
in waste without the least thought of future supply. 
Davies observes in his account of Ireland, that no Irish- 
man had ever planted an orchard. For that negligence 
some excuse might be drawn from an unsettled state of 
life, and the instability of property ; but in Scotland pos- 
session has long been secure, and inheritance regular ; yet 
it may be doubted whether before the Union 10 any man 
between Edinburgh and England had ever set a tree. 

MONTROSE. 

16 Leaving these fragments of magnificence, we traveled 
on to Montrose, which we surveyed in the morning, and 
found it well built, airy, and clean. The townhouse is a 
handsome fabric with a portico. We then went to view 
the English chapel, and found a small church, clean to 
a degree unknown in any other part of Scotland, with 



10 In 1707, Queen Anne reigning, the two countries were united 
under one parliament, and with a common name, Great Britain. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 75 

commodious galleries, and, what was yet less expected, 
with an organ. 

At our inn we did not find a reception such as we 
thought proportionate to the commercial opulence of the 
place; but Mr. Boswell desired me to observe that the 
innkeeper was an Englishman, and I then defended him 
as well as I could. 

17 When I had proceeded thus far, I had opportunities of 
observing what I had never heard, that there were many 
beggars in Scotland. In Edinburgh the proportion is, I 
think, not less than in London, and in the smaller places 
it is far greater than in English towns of the same ex- 
tent. It must, however, be allowed that they are not 
importunate. nor clamorous. They solicit silently, or 
very modestly, and therefore, though their behavior 
may strike with more force the heart of a stranger, they 
are certainly in danger of missing the attention of their 
countrymen. 

18 The road from Montrose exhibited a continuation of 
the same appearances. The country is still naked, the 
hedges are of stone, and the fields so generally plowed 
that it is hard to imagine where grass is found for the 
horses that till them. The harvest, which was almost 
ripe, appeared very plentiful. 

19 Early in the afternoon Mr. Boswell observed that 
we were at no great distance from the house of Lord 1X 
Monboddo. The magnetism of his conversation easily 
drew us out of our way, and the entertainment which we 
received would have been a sufficient recompense for a 
much greater deviation. 



11 A Scotch justice; wrote on the origin of language; believed 
man to be descended from the monkey. 



76 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

20 The roads beyond Edinburgh, as they are less fre- 
quented, must be expected to grow gradually rougher; 
but they were hitherto by no means incommodious. We 
traveled on with the gentle pace of a Scotch driver, who 
having no rivals in expedition, neither gives himself nor 
his horses unnecessary trouble. We did not affect the 
impatience we did not feel, but were satisfied with the 
company of each other, as well riding in the chaise, as 
sitting at an inn. The night and the day are equally 
solitary and equally safe ; for where there are so few 
travelers, why should there be robbers ? 

ABERDEEN. 

21 We came somewhat late to Aberdeen, and found the 
inn so full, that we had some difficulty in obtaining 
admission, till Mr. Boswell made himself known : his 
name overpowered all objection, and we found a very 
good house and civil treatment. 

22 To write of the cities of our own island with the 
solemnity of geographical description, as if we had been 
cast upon a newly discovered coast, has the appearance 
of a very frivolous ostentation ; yet as Scotland is little 
known to the greater part of those who may read these 
observations, it is not superfluous to relate, that under 
the name of Aberdeen are comprised two towns, standing 
about a mile distant from each other, but governed, I 
think, by the same magistrates. 

23 In Old Aberdeen stands the King's College, of which 
the first president was Hector Boece, or Boethius, 12 who 
may be justly reverenced as one of the revivers of elegant 
learning. When he studied at Paris, he was acquainted 



12 His " Consolations of Philosophy " was translated into Eng- 
lish by King Alfred. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 77 

with Erasmus, who afterward gave him a public testi- 
mony of his esteem, by inscribing to him a catalogue of 
his works. The style of Boethius, though, perhaps, not 
always rigorously pure, is formed with great diligence 
upon ancient models, and wholly uninfected with mo- 
nastic barbarity. His history is written with elegance and 
vigor, but his fabulousness and credulity are justly 
blamed. His fabulousness, if he was the author of the 
fictions, is a fault for which no apology can be made ; but 
his credulity may be excused in an age when all men 
were credulous. Learning was then rising on the world ; 
but ages so long accustomed to darkness were too much 
dazzled with its light to see anything distinctly. The first 
race of scholars in the fifteenth century, and some time 
after, were, for the most part, learning to speak, rather 
than to think, and were therefore more studious of ele- 
gance than of truth. The contemporaries of Boethius 
thought it sufficient to know what the ancients had de- 
livered. The examination of tenets and of facts was 
reserved for another generation. 

24 Boethius, as president of the university, enjoyed a 
revenue of forty Scottish marks, about two pounds four 
shillings and sixpence of sterling money. In the present 
age of trade and taxes, it is difficult even for the imagina- 
tion so to raise the value of money, or so to diminish the 
demands of life, as to suppose four and forty shillings a 
year an honorable stipend ; yet it was probably equal, 
not only to the needs, but to the rank of Boethius. The 
wealth of England was undoubtedly to that of Scotland 
more than five to one, and it is known that Henry the 
Eighth, among whose faults avarice 13 was never reckoned, 



He did not follow his father's example. 



78 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

granted to Roger Ascham, 14 as a reward of his learning, 
a pension of ten pounds a year. 

25 We came to Aberdeen on Saturday, August 21. On 
Monday we were invited into the townhall, where I had 
the freedom of the city given me by the Lord Provost. 15 
The honor conferred had all the decorations that polite- 
ness could add, and, what I am afraid I should not have 
had to say of any city south of the Tweed, I found no 
petty officer bowing for a fee. 

The parchment containing the record of admission is, 
with the seal appending, fastened to a riband, and worn 
for one day by the new citizen in his hat. 

26 The road beyond Aberdeen grew more stony, and con- 
tinued equally naked of all vegetable decoration. We 
traveled over a tract of ground near the sea, which, not 
long ago, suffered a very uncommon and unexpected 
calamity. The sand of the shore was raised by a tempest 
in such quantities, and carried to such a distance, that 
an estate was overwhelmed and lost. Such and so hope- 
less was the barrenness superinduced, that the owner, 
when he was required to pay the usual tax, desired rather 
to resign the ground. 

SLANES CASTLE. 

27 We came in the afternoon to Slanes Castle, built upon 
the margin of the sea, so that the walls of one of the 
towers seem only a continuation of a perpendicular rock, 
the foot of which is beaten by the waves. To walk round 
the house seemed impracticable. From the windows the 
eye wanders over the sea that separates Scotland from 



14 Teacher of Queen Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey ; author of 
The Scholemaster, and Toxophilus, both wise and learned books. 

15 Chief executive officer of the city. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 79 

Norway, and when the winds beat with violence, must 
enjoy all the terrific grandeur ie of the tempestuous ocean. 
I would not for my amusement wish for a storm ; but as 
storms, whether wished or not, will sometimes happen, I 
may say, without violation of humanity, that I should 
willingly look out upon them from Slanes Castle. 

28 Next morning we continued our journey, pleased with 
our reception at Slanes Castle, of which we had now 
leisure to recount the grandeur and the elegance ; for our 
way afforded us few topics of conversation. The ground 
was neither uncultivated nor unfruitful ; but it was still 
all arable. Of flocks or herds there was no appearance. 
I had now traveled two hundred miles in Scotland, and 
seen only one tree not younger than myself. 

BANFF. 

29 We dined this day at the house of Mr. Frazer, of 
Streichon, who showed us in his grounds some stones 
yet standing of a Druidical circle, and what I began to 
think more worthy of notice, some forest trees of full 
growth. 

ELGIN. 

30 Finding nothing to detain us at Banff, we set out in 
the morning, and having breakfasted at Cullen, about 
noon came to Elgin, where, in the inn that we supposed 
the best, a dinner was set before us which we could not 
eat. This was the first time, and except one the last, that 
I found any reason to complain of a Scotch table; and 
such disappointments, I suppose, must be expected in 

10 " By heaven, it is a splendid sight to see, 

For one who hath no friend, no brother there!" 

— Byron. 



80 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

every country where there is no great frequency of trav- 
elers. 

31 The ruins of the cathedral of Elgin afforded us 
another proof of the waste of reformation. There is 
enough yet remaining to show that it was once magnifi- 
cent. Its whole plot is easily traced. The church of 
Elgin had, in the intestine tumults of the barbarous ages, 
been laid waste by the irruption of a Highland chief, 
whom the bishop had offended; but it was gradually 
restored to the state of which the traces may be now 
discerned, and was at last not destroyed by the tumultu- 
ous violence of Knox, but more shamefully suffered to 
dilapidate by deliberate robbery and frigid indifference. 
There is till extant, in the books of the council, an order, 
of which I cannot remember the date, but which was 
doubtless issued after the reformation, directing that the 
lead, 17 which covers the two cathedrals of Elgin and 
Aberdeen, shall be taken away, and converted into money 
for the support of the army. A Scotch army was in 
those times very cheaply kept; yet the lead of two 
churches must have borne so small a proportion to any 
military expense, that it is hard not to believe the reason 
alleged to be merely popular, and the money intended 
for some private purse. The order, however, was obeyed ; 
the two churches were stripped, and the lead was shipped 
to be sold in Holland. I hope every reader will rejoice 
that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea. 

32 Let us not, however, make too much haste to despise 
our neighbors. Our own cathedrals are moldering by 
unregarded dilapidation. It seems to be part of the 



17 To use a word of Burke's, they " unplumbed " the Cathedrals. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 81 

despicable philosophy of the time to despise monuments 
of sacred magnificence, and we are in danger of doing 
that deliberately, which the Scots did not do but in the 
unsettled state of an imperfect constitution. Those 
who had once uncovered the cathedrals never wished 
to cover them again ; and being thus made use- 
less, they were first neglected, and perhaps, as the stone 
was wanted, afterward demolished. 

FORES. — CALDER. — FORT GEORGE. 

33 We went forward the same day to Fores the town to 
which Macbeth was traveling when he met the weird 
sisters in his way. 18 This to an Englishman is classic 
ground. Our imaginations were heated, and our thoughts 
recalled to their old amusements. 

34 We had now a prelude to the Highlands. We began 
to leave fertility and culture behind us, and saw for a 
great length of road nothing but heath ; yet at Fochabers, 
a seat belonging to the Duke of Gordon, there is an 
orchard, which in Scotland I had never seen before, with 
some timber-trees, and a plantation of oaks. 

35 At Fores we found good accommodation, but nothing 
worthy of particular remark, and next morning entered 
upon the road on which Macbeth heard the fatal pre- 
diction ; 19 but we traveled on, not interrupted by promises 
of kingdoms, and came to Nairn, a royal burgh, which, if 



18 And saluted them with : — 

" How far is't called to Fores? " Then without waiting for the 
information, the sight being more interesting, he thought aloud : — 

" What are these 
So withered and so w'ld in their attire, 
That look not like th' inhabitants o' th' earth, 
And yet are on't ? " 
w The witches " all-hailed " him, Glamis, Cawdor, King hereafter. 
6 



82 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

once it flourished, is now in a state of miserable decay ; 
but I know not whether its chief annual magistrate has 
not still the title of Lord Provost. 

36 At Nairn we may fix the verge of the Highlands ; for 
here I first saw peat fires, and first heard the Erse lan- 
guage. We had no motive to stay longer than to break- 
fast, and went forward to the house of Mr. Macaulay, 
the minister who published an account of St. Kilda, and 
by his direction visited Calder Castle, from which Mac- 
beth drew his second title. It has been formerly a place 
of strength. The drawbridge is still to be seen, but the 
moat is now dry. 

37 We were favored by a gentleman, who lives in the 
castle, with a letter to one of the officers at Fort George, 
which being the most regular fortification in the island, 
well deserves the notice of a traveler who has never 
traveled before. We went thither next day, found a 
very kind, reception, were led round the works by a gen- 
tleman who explained the use of every part, and enter- 
tained by Sir Eyre Coote, 20 the governor, with such 
elegance of conversation as left us no attention to the 
delicacies of his table. 

INVERNESS. 

38 Inverness was the last place which had a regular com- 
munication by high roads with the southern counties. 

Here is a castle, called the Castle of Macbeth, the 
walls of which are yet standing. It was no very capa- 



20 Commander of the British army in India. " The appearance 
of Eyre Coote checked the progress of Hyder Ali, and in 1781 the 
victory of Porto Novo hurled him, back into the fastnesses of My- 
sore." — Green. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 83 

cions edifice, but stands upon a rock so high and steep, 
that I think it was once not accessible but by the help of 
ladders, or a bridge. Over against it, on another hill, 
was a fort built by Cromwell, now totally demolished; 
for no faction of Scotland loved the name of Cromwell, 
or had any desire to continue his memory. 

Yet what the Romans did to other nations, was in a 
great degree done by Cromwell to the Scots ; he civilized 
them by conquest, and introduced by useful violence the 
arts of peace. I was told at Aberdeen that the people 
learned from Cromwell's soldiers to make shoes and to 
plant kail. 

39 How they lived without kail, it is not easy to guess ; 
they cultivate hardly any other plant for common tables, 
and when they had not kail they probably had nothing. 
The numbers that go barefoot are still sufficient to show 
that shoes may be spared ; they are not yet considered as 
necessaries of life ; for tall boys, not otherwise meanly 
dressed, run without them in the streets ; and in the 
islands the sons of gentlemen pass several of their first 
years with naked feet. 

40 I know not whether it be not peculiar to the Scots to 
have attained the liberal, without the manual, arts, to 
have excelled in ornamental knowledge, and to have 
wanted not only the elegancies, but the conveniences of 
common life. Literature, soon after its revival, found its 
way to Scotland, and from the middle of the sixteenth 
century almost to the middle of the seventeenth, the 
politer studies were very diligently pursued. 

Yet men thus ingenious and inquisitive were content 
to live in total ignorance of the trades by which human 
wants are supplied, and to supply them by the grossest 



84 A TOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

means. Till the Union 21 made them acquainted with 
English manners, the culture of their lands was unskillful, 
and their domestic life unformed. 

41 Since they have known that their condition was ca- 
pable of improvement, their progress in useful knowledge 
has been rapid and uniform. What remains to be done 
they will quickly do, and then wonder, like me, why 
that which was so necessary and so easy was so long 
delayed. But they must be forever content to owe to 
the English that elegance and culture, which, if they had 
been vigilant and active, perhaps the English might have 
owed to them. 

42 Here the appearance of life began to alter. I had seen 
a few women with plaids at Aberdeen : but at Inverness 
the Highland manners are common. There is, I think, 
a kirk in which only the Erse language is used. There 
is likewise an English chapel, but meanly built, where 
on Sunday we saw a very decent congregation. 

43 We were now to bid farewell to the luxury of travel- 
ing, and to enter a country, upon which perhaps no 
wheel has ever rolled. We could indeed have used our 
post-chaise one day longer, but we could have hired no 
horses beyond Inverness, and we were not so sparing of 
ourselves as to lead them, merely that we might have 
one day longer the indulgence of a carriage. 

44 At Inverness, therefore, we procured three horses for 
ourselves and a servant, and one more for our baggage, 
which was no very heavy load. We found in the course 
of our journey the convenience of having disencumbered 
ourselves, by laying aside whatever we could spare; for 

21 The Doctor does not allow one to forget what he thinks Scot- 
land owes to England. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 85 

it is not to be imagined without experience, how in 
climbing crags, and treading bogs, and winding through 
narrow and obstructed passages, a little bulk will hinder, 
and a little weight will burden. 

LOCH NESS. 

45 We took two Highlanders to run beside us, partly 
to show us the way, and partly to take back from the 
seaside the horses, of which they were the owners. One 
of them was a man of great liveliness and activity, of 
whom his companion said, that he would tire any horse 
in Inverness. Both of them were civil and ready-handed. 
Civility seems part of the national character of High- 
landers. Every chieftain is a monarch, and politeness, 
the natural product of royal government, is diffused from 
the laird through the whole clan. But they are not 
commonly dexterous ; their narrowness of life confines 
them to a few operations, and they are accustomed to 
endure little wants more than to remove them. 

46 We mounted our steeds on the 28th of August, and 
directed our guides to conduct us to Fort Augustus. It 
is built at the head of Loch Ness, of which Inverness 
stands at the outlet. The way between them has been 
cut by the soldiers, and the greater part of it runs along 
a rock, leveled with great labor and exactness, near the 
water-side. 

47 Most of this day's journey was very pleasant. The 
day, though bright, was not hot ; and the appearance of 
the country, if I had not seen the Peak, would have been 
wholly new. We went upon a surface so hard and level, 
that we had little care to hold the bridle, and were there- 
fore at full leisure for contemplation. On the left were 



86 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

high and steepy rocks shaded with birch, the hardy 
native of the north, and covered with fern or heath. On 
the right the limpid waters of Loch Ness were beating 
their bank, and waving their surface by a gentle agi- 
tation. Beyond them were rocks sometimes covered with 
verdure, and sometimes towering in horrid nakedness. 
Now and then we espied a little cornfield, which served 
to impress more strongly the general barrenness. 

48 It was said at Fort Augustus, that Loch Ness is open 
in the hardest winters, though a lake not far from it is 
covered with ice. In discussing these exceptions from 
the course of nature, the first question is, whether the 
fact be justly stated. That which is strange is delightful, 
and a pleasing error is not willingly detected. Accuracy 
of narration is not very common, and there are few so 
rigidly philosophical, as not to represent as perpetual 
what is only frequent, or as constant what is really 
casual. 

49 Near the way, by the water-side, we espied a cottage. 
This was the first Highland hut that I had seen ; and as 
our business was with life and manners, we were willing 
to visit it. To enter a habitation without leave seems to 
be not considered here as rudeness or intrusion. The old 
laws of hospitality still give this license to a stranger. 

50 A hut is constructed with loose stones, ranged for the 
most part with some tendency to circularity. It must be 
placed where the wind cannot act upon it with violence, 
because it has no cement; and where the water will run 
easily away, because it has no floor but the naked ground. 
The wall, which is commonly about six feet high, de- 
clines from the perpendicular a little inward. No light 
is admitted, but at the entrance, and through a hole in 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 87 

the thatch, which gives vent to the smoke. This hole 
is not directly over the fire, lest the rain should extin- 
guish it, and the smoke therefore naturally fills the place 
before it escapes. Such is the general structure of the 
houses in which one of the nations of this opulent and 
powerful island has been hitherto content to live. Huts, 
however, are not more uniform than palaces ; and this 
which we were inspecting was very far from one of the 
meanest, for it was divided into several apartments ; and 
its inhabitants possessed such property as a pastoral poet 
might exalt into riches. 

FALL OF FIERS. 

51 Toward evening we crossed, by a bridge, the river 
which makes the celebrated Fall of Fiers. The country 
at the bridge strikes the imagination with all the gloom 
and grandeur of Siberian solitude. The way makes a 
flexure, and the mountains, covered with trees, rise at 
once on the left hand and in the front. 

But we visited the place at an unseasonable time, 
and found it divested of its dignity and terror. Nature 
never gives everything at once. A long continuance of 
dry weather, which made the rest of the way easy and 
delightful, deprived us of the pleasure expected from the 
Fall of Fiers.- The river having now no water but what 
the springs supply, showed us only a swift current, clear 
and shallow, fretting over the asperities of the rocky 
bottom. 

The way now grew less easy, descending by an uneven 
declivity, but without either dirt or danger. We did not 
arrive at Fort Augustus till it was late. Mr. Boswell, 
who between his father's merit and his own, is sure of 



88 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

reception wherever he comes, sent a servant before to beg 
admission and entertainment for that night. 

FORT AUGUSTUS. 

52 In the morning we viewed the fort, which is much 
less than that of St. George, and is said to be commanded 
by the neighboring hills. It was not long ago taken by 
the Highlanders. But its situation seems well chosen for 
pleasure, if not for strength; it stands at the head of the 
lake, and, by a sloop of sixty tons, is supplied from 
Inverness with great convenience. 

53 We were now to cross the Highlands toward the 
western coast, and to content ourselves with such ac- 
commodations, as a way so little frequented could afford. 

The country is totally denuded of its wood, but the 
stumps both of oaks and firs, which are still found, show 
that it has been once a forest of large timber. I do not 
remember that we saw any animals, but we were told 
that, in the mountains, there are stags, roebucks, goats, 
and rabbits. 

We did not perceive that this tract was possessed by 
human beings, except that once we saw a cornfield, in 
which a lady was walking with some gentlemen. Their 
house was certainly at no great distance, but so situated 
that we could not descry it. 

54 Passing on through the dreariness of solitude, we 
found a party of soldiers from the fort, working on the 
road, under the superintendence of a sergeant. We told 
them how kindly we had been treated at the garrison, 
and as we were enjoying the benefit of their labors, 
begged leave to show our gratitude by a small present. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 89 

ANOCH. 

55 Early in the afternoon we came to Anoch, a village in 
Glenmollison of three huts, one of which is distinguished 
by a chimney. Here we were to dine and lodge, and 
were conducted through the first room, that had the 
chimney, into another lighted by a small glass window. 
The landlord attended us with great civility, and told us 
what he could give us to eat and drink. I found some 
books on a shelf, among which were a volume or more of 
" Prideaux's Connexion." 

This I mentioned as something unexpected, and per- 
ceived that I did not please him. I praised the propriety 
of his language, and was answered that I need not won- 
der, for he had learned it by grammar. 

56 By subsequent opportunities of observation, I found 
that my host's diction had nothing peculiar. Those 
Highlanders that can speak English, commonly speak it 
well, with few of the words, and little of the tone by 
which a Scotchman is distinguished. Their language 
seems to have been learned in the army or the navy, or 
by some communication with those who could give them 
good examples of accent and pronunciation. By their 
Lowland neighbors they would not willingly be taught ; 
for they have long considered them as a mean and de- 
generate race. These prejudices are wearing fast away; 
but so much of them still remains, that when I asked a 
very learned minister in the islands, which they con- 
sidered as their most savage clans, " Those," said he, 
" that live next the Lowlands." 

57 Some time after dinner we were surprised by the 
entrance of a young woman, not inelegant either in 



9 o A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

mien or dress, who asked us whether we would have tea. 
We found that she was the daughter of our host, and 
desired her to make it. Her conversation, like her appear- 
ance, was gentle and pleasing. We knew that the girls 
of the Highlands are all gentlewomen, and treated her 
with great respect, which she received as customary and 
due, and was neither elated by it, nor confused, but 
repaid my civilities without embarrassment, and told me 
how much I honored her country by coming to survey it. 

58 In the evening the soldiers, whom we had passed on 
the road, came to spend at our inn the little money that 
we had given them. They had the true military im- 
patience of coin in their pockets, and had marched at 
least six miles to find the first place where liquor could 
be bought. Having never been before in a place so wild 
and unfrequented, I was glad of their arrival, because I 
knew that we had made them friends, and to gain still 
more of their good-will, we went to them where they 
were carousing in the barn, and added something to our 
former gift. All that we gave was not much, but it 
detained them in the barn either merry or quarreling, 
the whole night, and in the morning they went back to 
their work, with great indignation at the bad qualities of 
whisky. 

59 We had gained so much the favor of our host, that 
when we left his house in the morning, he walked by us 
a great way, and entertained us with conversation both 
on his own condition, and that of the country. His life 
seemed to be merely pastoral, except that he differed 
from some of the ancient Nomades in having a settled 
dwelling. His wealth consists of one hundred sheep, as 
many goats, twelve milk cows, and twenty-eight beeves 
ready for the drover. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 



9 1 



60 From him we first heard of the general dissatisfaction 
which is now driving" the Highlanders into the other 
hemisphere ; "and when I asked him whether they would 
stay at home if they were well treated, he answered with 
indignation, that no man willingly left his native coun- 
try. Of the farm, which he himself occupied, the rent 
had, in twenty-five years, been advanced from five to 
twenty pounds, which he found himself so little able 
to pay that he would be glad to try his fortune in some 
other place. 

61 Our host having amused us for a time, resigned us to 
our guides. The journey of this day was long, not that 
the distance was great, but that the way was difficult. 
We were now in the bosom of the Highlands, with full 
leisure to contemplate the appearance and properties of 
mountainous regions, such as have been, in many coun- 
tries, the last shelters of national distress, and are every- 
where the scenes of adventures, stratagems, surprises, 
and escapes. 

62 Mountainous countries are not passed but with diffi- 
culty ; not merely from the labor of climbing, for to 
climb is not always necessary : but because that which 
is not mountain is commonly bog, through which the 
way must be picked with caution. Where there are hills, 
there is much rain, and the torrents pouring down into 
the intermediate spaces, seldom find so ready an outlet 
as not to stagnate till they have broken the texture of 
the ground. 

63 Of the hills, which our journey offered to the view on 
either side, we did not take the height, nor did we see 
any that astonished us with their loftiness. Toward the 
summit of one there was a white spot, which I should 
have called a naked rock ; but the guides, who had better 



92 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

eyes and were acquainted with the phenomena of the 
country, declared it to be snow. It had already lasted 
to the end of August, and was likely to maintain its con- 
test with the sun till it should be reinforced by winter. 

64 We passed many rivers and rivulets, which commonly 
ran with a clear shallow stream over a hard pebbly bot- 
tom. These channels, which seem so much wider than 
the water that they convey would naturally require, are 
formed by the violence of wintry floods, produced by the 
accumulation of innumerable streams that fall in rainy 
weather from the hills, and bursting away with resistless 
impetuosity, make themselves a passage proportionate to 
their mass. 

65 Of the hills many may be called, with Homer's Ida, 
" abundant in springs," but few can deserve the epithet 
which he bestows upon Pelion, by " waving their leaves." 
They exhibit very little variety; being almost wholly 
covered with dark heath, and even that seems to be 
checked in its growth. What is not heath is nakedness, 
a little diversified by now and then a stream rushing down 
the steep. An eye accustomed to flowery pastures and 
waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide 
extent of hopeless sterility. 

66 It will very readily occur, that this uniformity of 
barrenness can afford very little amusement to the trav- 
eler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks, 
and heath, and waterfalls: and that these journeys are 
useless labors, which neither impregnate the imagination 
nor enlarge the understanding. It is true, that of far 
the greater part of things we must content ourselves with 
such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy 
supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are al- 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 93 

ways incomplete, and that, at least till we have compared 
them with realities, we do not know them to be just. 

67 Regions mountainous and wild, thinly inhabited, and 
little cultivated, make a great part of the earth, and he 
that has never seen them must live unacquainted with 
much of the face of nature, and with one of the great 
scenes of human existence. 

68 As the day advanced toward noon, we entered a nar- 
row valley not very flowery, but sufficiently verdant. 
Our guides told us, that the horses could not travel all 
day without rest or meat, and entreated us to stop here, 
because no grass would be found in any other place. 
The request was reasonable, and the argument cogent. 
We therefore willingly dismounted, and diverted our- 
selves as the place gave us opportunity. 

69 I sat down on a bank, such as a writer of romance 
might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees 
to whisper over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at 
my feet. The day was calm, the air was soft, and all was 
rudeness, silence, and solitude. Before me, and on either 
side, were high hills, which by hindering the eye from 
ranging, forced the mind to find entertainment — for 
itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know not; for 
here I first conceived the thought of this narration. 

70 We were in this place at ease and by choice, and had 
no evils to suffer or to fear ; yet the imaginations excited 
by the view of an unknown and untraveled wilderness are 
not such as arise in the artificial solitude of parks and 

22 " Arrived there, the little house they fill, 

Ne looke for entertainment, where none was : 
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will : 
The noblest mind the best contentment has." 

— The Faerie Quccne, Book I, Canto I , line 35. 



94 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

gardens, a flattering notion of self-sufficiency, a placid 
indulgence of. voluntary delusions, a secure expansion of 
the fancy, or a cool concentration of the mental powers. 
The phantoms which haunt a desert are want and mis- 
ery and danger; the evils of dereliction rush upon the 
thoughts ; man is made unwillingly acquainted with his 
own weakness, and meditation shows him only how little 
he can sustain, and how little he can perform. There 
were no traces of inhabitants, except, perhaps, a rude 
pile of clods, called a summer hut, in which a herdsman 
had rested in the favorable seasons. 

GLENSHEALS. 

71 We were now at a place where we could obtain milk, 
but must have wanted bread if we had not brought it. 
The people of this valley did not appear to know any 
English, and our guides now became doubly necessary 
as interpreters. A woman, whose hut was distinguished 
by greater spaciousness and better architecture, brought 
out some pails of milk. The villagers gather about us 
in considerable numbers, I believe without any evil inten- 
tion, but with a very savage wildness of aspect and man- 
ner. When our meal was over, Mr. Boswell sliced the 
bread, and divided it amongst them, as he supposed them 
never to have tasted a wheaten loaf before. He then gave 
them little pieces of twisted tobacco, and among the 
children we distributed a small handful of halfpence, 
which they received with great eagerness. Yet I have 
been since told, that the people of that valley are not 
indigent; and when we mentioned them afterward as 
needy and pitiable, a Highland lady let us know, that 
we might spare our commiseration ; for the dame whose 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 95 

milk we drank had probably more than a dozen milk 
cows. She seemed unwilling to take any price, but being 
pressed to make a demand, at last named a shilling. 
Honesty is not greater where elegance is less. One of 
the by-standers, as we were told afterward, advised her 
to ask more, but she said a shilling was enough. We 
gave her half-a-crown, and I hope got some credit by 
our behavior ; for the company said, if our interpreters 
did not flatter us, that they had not seen such a day since 
the old laird of Macleod passed through their country. 

GLENELG. 

72 We left Auknasheals and the Macraes in the after- 
noon, and in the evening came to Ratikin, a high hill on 
which a road is cut, but so steep and narrow that it is 
very difficult. There is now a design of making another 
way round the bottom. Upon one of the precipices my 
horse, weary with the steepness of the rise, staggered a 
little, and I called in haste to the Highlander to hold 
him. This was the only moment of my journey in which 
I thought myself endangered. 

73 Having surmounted the hill at last, we were told that 
at Glenelg, on the sea-side, we should come to a house of 
lime, and slate, and glass. This image of magnificence 
raised our expectation. At last we came to our inn, 
weary and peevish, and began to inquire for meat and 
beds. 

74 Of the provisions the negative catalogue was very 
copious. Here was no meat, no milk, no bread, no eggs, 
no wine. We did not express much satisfaction. Here, 
however, we were to stay. Whisky we might have, and 
I believe at last they caught a fowl and killed it ; we 



9 6 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

had some bread, and with that we prepared ourselves to 
be contented, when we had a very eminent proof of 
Highland hospitality. Along some miles of the way in 
the evening, a gentleman's servant had kept us company 
on foot with very little notice on our part. He left us 
near Glenelg, and we thought on him no more till he 
came to us again in about two hours, with a present 
from his master of rum and sugar. 

75 We were now to examine our lodging. Out 23 of one 
of the beds on which we were to repose, started up at 
our entrance a man black as a Cyclops from the forge. 
Other circumstances of no elegant recital concurred to 
disgust us. We had been frighted by a lady at Edin- 
burgh with discouraging representations of Highland 
lodgings. Sleep, however, was necessary. Our High- 
landers had at last found some hay, with which the inn 
could not supply them; I directed them to bring a bun- 
dle into the room, and slept upon it in my riding coat. 
Mr. Boswell being more delicate, laid himself sheets, 
with hay over and under him, and lay in linen like a 
gentleman. 

SKYE. ARMIDEL. 

76 In the morning, September the twentieth, we found 
ourselves on the edge of the sea. Having procured a 
boat, we dismissed our Highlanders, whom I would 
recommend to the service of any future travelers, and 



23 In his essay on Croker's Boswell's Johnson, Macaulay says 
that the original form of this " Tour " was a series of letters to 
Mrs. Thrale. The learned world has had sport over what it was 
pleased to call " Johnsonese." Macaulay quotes this passage from 
the Letters: "A dirty fellow bounced out of the bed in which one 
of us was to lie." From this Johnson translated it into the form it 
has in the text. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 97 

were ferried over to the isle of Skye. We landed at 
Armidel, where we were met on the sands by Sir Alex- 
ander Macdonald, who was at that time there "with his 
lady, preparing to leave the island and reside at Edin- 
burgh. 

77 As we sat at Sir Alexander's table, we were enter- 
tained, according to the ancient usage of the north, with 
the melody of the bagpipe. Everything in those coun- 
tries has its history. As the bagpiper was playing, an 
elderly gentleman informed us that in some remote time 
the Macdonalds of Glengary having been injured or 
offended by the inhabitants of Culloden, and resolving to 
have justice or vengeance, came to Culloden on a Sunday, 
where, finding their enemies at worship, they shut them 
up in the church, which they set on fire ; and this, said 
he, is the tune that the piper played while they were 
burning. 

78 He that travels in the Highlands may easily saturate 
his soul with intelligence, if he will acquiesce in the 
first account. The Highlander gives to every question 
an answer so prompt and peremptory, that scepticism 
itself is dared into silence, and the mind sinks before 
the bold reporter in unresisting credulity ; but if a sec- 
ond question be ventured, it breaks the enchantment ; 
for it is immediately discovered, that what was told so 
confidently was told at hazard, and that such fearlessness 
of assertion was either the sport of negligence, or the 
refuge of ignorance. 

79 In our passage from Scotland to Skye, we were- wet 
for the first time with a shower. This was the beginning 
of the Highland winter, after which we were told that a 
succession of three dry days was not to be expected for 

7 



98 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

many months. The winter of the Hebrides consists of 
little more than rain and wind. As they are surrounded 
by an ocean never frozen, the blasts that come to them 
over the water are too much softened to have the power 
of congelation. The salt lochs, or inlets of the sea, 
which shoot very far into the island, never have any ice 
upon them, and the pools of fresh water will never bear 
the walker. The snow that sometimes falls is soon dis- 
solved by the air or the rain. 

CORIATACHAN IN SKYE. 

80 The third or fourth day after our arrival at Armidel 
brought us an invitation to the isle of Raasay, which lies 
east of Skye. It is incredible how soon the account of 
any event is propagated in these narrow countries by the 
love of talk which much leisure produces, and the relief 
given to the mind in the penury of insular conversation 
by a new topic. I know not whether we touched at any 
corner, where fame had not already prepared us a re- 
ception. 

81 To gain a commodious passage to Raasay, it was nec- 
essary to pass over a large part of Skye. We were fur- 
nished therefore with horses and a guide. In the islands 
there are no roads, nor any marks by which a stranger 
may find his way. 

But there seems to be in all this more alarm than 
danger. The Highlander walks carefully before, and the 
horse, accustomed to the ground, follows him with little 
deviation. Sometimes the hill is too steep for the horse- 
man to keep his seat, and sometimes the moss is too 
tremulous to bear the double weight of horse and man. 
The rider then dismounts, and all shift as they can. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 99 

82 The weather was next day too violent for the con- 
tinuation of our journey; but we had no reason to com- 
plain of the interruption. We saw in every place what 
we chiefly desired to know — the manners of the people. 
We had company, and if we had chosen retirement, we 
might have had books. 

I never was in any house of the islands where I did 
not find books in more languages than one, if I had 
stayed long enough to want them, except one from which 
the family was removed. Literature is not neglected by 
the higher rank of the Hebridians. 

83 It need not, I suppose, be mentioned, that in countries 
so little frequented as the islands, there are no houses 
where travelers are entertained for money. He that 
wanders about these wilds, either procures recommenda- 
tions to those whose habitations lie near his way, or, 
when night and weariness come upon him, takes the 
chance of general hospitality. If he finds only a cottage, 
he can expect little more than shelter, for the cottagers 
have little more for themselves ; but if his good fortune 
brings him to the residence of a gentleman, he will be 
glad of a storm to prolong his stay. 

84 At the tables where a stranger is received neither 
plenty nor delicacy is wanting. A tract of land so thinly 
inhabited must have much wild-fowl ; and I scarcely 
remember to have seen a dinner without them. The 
moor-game is everywhere to be had. That the sea 
abounds with fish needs not be told, for it supplies a 
great part of Europe. 

85 A man of the Hebrides, for of the women's diet I can 
give no account, as soon as he appears in the morning, 
swallows a glass of whisky ; yet they are not a drunken 

Lc 



ioo A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

race, at least I never was present at much intemperance ; 
but no man is so abstemious as to refuse the morning 
dram, which they call a skalk. The word whisky sig- 
nifies water, and is applied by way of eminence to strong 
water, or distilled liquor. The spirit drank in the north 
is drawn from barley. I never tasted it, except once for 
experiment at the inn in Inveraray, when I thought it 
preferable to any English malt brandy. 

86 Not long after the dram may be expected the break- 
fast, a meal in which the Scots, whether of the lowlands 
or mountains, must be confessed to excel us. The tea and 
coffee are accompanied not only with butter, but with 
honey, conserves, and marmalades. If an epicure could 
remove by a wish, in quest of sensual gratifications, 24 
wherever he had supped, he would breakfast in Scotland. 

In the islands, however, they do what I found it not 
very easy to endure. They pollute the tea-table by plates 
piled with large slices of Cheshire cheese, which mingles 
its less grateful odors with the fragrance of the tea. 

87 Where many questions are to be asked, some will be 
omitted. I forgot to inquire how they were supplied with 
so much exotic luxury. Perhaps the French may bring 
them wine for wool, and the Dutch give them tea and 
coffee at the fishing season, in exchange for fresh pro- 
vision. Their trade is unconstrained ; they pay no cus- 
toms, for there is no officer to demand them ; whatever, 
therefore, is made dear only by impost, is obtained here 
at an easy rate. 

88 A dinner in the Western Islands differs very little 
from a dinner in England, except that in the place of 



24 travel by a wish in search of delicacies. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 101 

tarts there are always set different preparations of milk. 
This part of their diet will admit some improvement. 
Though they have milk, and eggs, and sugar, few of them 
know how to compound them in a custard. Their gar- 
dens afford them no great variety, but they have always 
some vegetables on the table. Potatoes at least are never 
wanting, which, though they have not known them long, 
are now one of the principal parts of their food. They 
are not of the mealy, but of the viscous kind. 

89 The knives are not often either very bright or very 
sharp. They are indeed instruments of which the High- 
landers have not been long acquainted with the general 
use. They were not regularly laid on the table, before 
the prohibition of arms, and the change of dress. Thirty 
years ago the Highlander wore his knife as a companion 
to his dirk or dagger, and when the company sat down to 
meat, the men who had knives cut the flesh into small 
pieces for the women, who with their fingers conveyed it 
to their mouths. 

90 There was, perhaps, never any change of national 
manners so quick, so great, and so general, as that which 
has operated in the Highlands, by the last conquest, 25 and 
the subsequent laws. We came thither too late to see 
what we expected, a people of peculiar appearance, and a 
system of antiquated life. Of what they had before the 
late conquest of their country, there remain only their 
language and their poverty. Their language is attacked 
on every side. Schools are erected, in which English 
only is taught, and there were lately some who thought 
it reasonable to refuse them a version of the holy Scrip- 



In 1746, by the Duke of Cumberland. 



102 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

tures, that they might have no monument 26 of their 
mother-tongue. 

That their poverty is gradually abated cannot be 
mentioned among the unpleasing consequences of sub- 
jection. They are now acquainted with money, and the 
possibility of gain will by degrees make them industrious. 
Such is the effect of the late regulations, that a longer 
journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him 
whose curiosity pants for savage virtues and barbarous 
grandeur. 

RAASAY. 

91 At the first intermission of the stormy weather we 
were informed that the boat, which was to convey us to 
Raasay, attended 27 us on the coast. We had from this 
time our intelligence facilitated 28 and our conversation 
enlarged by the company of Mr. Macqueen, minister of 
a parish in Skye, whose knowledge and politeness give 
him a title equally to kindness and respect, and who from 
this time never forsook us till we were preparing to leave 
Skye and the adjacent places. 

92 The boat was under the direction of Mr. Malcolm 
Macleod, a gentleman of Raasay. The water was calm 
and the rowers were vigorous, so that our passage was 
quick and pleasant. When we came near the island we 
saw the laird's house, a neat modern fabric, and found 
Mr. Macleod, the proprietor of the island, with many 
gentlemen, expecting us on the beach. We had, as at all 
other places, some difficulty in landing. The crags were 



20 something to remind them of. 

27 waited for. 

28 process made easy. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 



103 



irregularly broken, and a false step would have been very 
mischievous. 29 

93 Our reception exceeded our expectations. We found 
nothing but civility, elegance, and plenty. After the 
usual refreshments and the usual conversation, the even- 
ing came upon us. The carpet was then rolled off" the 
floor ; the musician was called, and the whole company 
was invited to dance, nor did ever fairies trip with 
greater alacrity. The general air of festivity which pre- 
dominated in this place, so far remote from all those 
regions which the mind has been used to contemplate as 
the mansions of pleasure, struck the imagination with a 
delightful surprise, analogous to that which is felt at an 
unexpected emersion from darkness into light. 

94 When it was time to sup, the dance ceased, and six- 
and-thirty persons sat down to two tables in the same 
room. After supper the ladies sung Erse 30 songs, to 
which I listened as an English audience to an Italian 
opera, delighted with the sound of words which I did not 
understand. 

I inquired the subjects of the songs, and was told of 
one that it was a love song, and of another that it was a 
farewell composed by one of the islanders that was 
going, in this epidemical fury of emigration, to seek his 
fortune in America. What sentiments would rise on such 
an occasion in the heart of one who had not been taught 
to lament by precedent I should gladly have known ; but 
the lady by whom I sat thought herself not equal to the 
work of translating. 



injurious. 
Gaelic. 



104 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

95 Mr. Macleod is the proprietor of the islands of Raa- 
say, Rona, and Fladda, and possesses an extensive district 
in Skye. The estate has not during four hundred years 
gained or lost a single acre. 

96 It is not very easy to fix the principles upon which 
mankind have agreed to eat some animals and reject 
others. An Englishman is not easily persuaded to dine 
on snails with an Italian, on frogs with a Frenchman, 
or on horse-flesh with a Tartar. The vulgar 31 inhabit- 
ants of Skye, I know not whether of the other islands, 
have not only eels, but pork and bacon in abhorrence. 

97 In Raasay they might have hares and rabbits, for they 
have no foxes. Some depredations, such as were never 
made before, have caused a suspicion that a fox has been 
lately landed in the island by spite or wantonness. How 
beasts of prey came into any islands is not easy to guess. 
In cold countries they take advantage of hard winters, 
and travel over the ice ; but this is a very scanty 32 solu- 
tion, for they are found where they have no discoverable 
means of coming. 

98 The corn 33 of this island is but little. I saw the 
harvest of a small field. The women reaped the corn and 
the men bound up the sheaves. The strokes of the sickle 
were timed by the modulation of the harvest-song, in 
which all their voices were united. They accompany in 
the Highlands every action which can be done in equal 
time with an appropriate strain, which has, they say, 
not much meaning; but its effects are regularity and 
cheerfulness. The ancient song by which the rowers 

31 common people. 

82 poor, unsatisfactory. 

83 grain. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 105 

,of galleys were animated may be supposed to have been 
of this kind. There is now an oar-song used by the 
Hebridians. 

99 The ground of Raasay seems fitter for cattle than for 
corn ; and of black cattle, I suppose, the number is very 
great. The laird himself keeps a herd of four hundred, 
one hundred of which are annually sold. Of an exten- 
sive domain, which he holds in his own hands, he con- 
siders the sale of the cattle as repaying him the rent, and 
supports the plenty of a very liberal table with the re- 
maining product. 

100 Raasay is supposed to have been very long inhabited. 
On one side of it they show caves into which the rude 
nations of the first ages retreated from the weather. 
These dreary vaults might have had other uses. There 
is still a cavity near the house called the oar-cave, in 
which the seamen, after one of those piratical expedi- 
tions, which in rougher times were very frequent, used, 
as tradition tells, to hide their oars. This hollow was 
near the sea, that nothing so necessary might be far to 
be fetched ; and it was secret, that enemies, if they 
landed, could find nothing. Yet it is not very evident of 
what use it was to hide their oars from those, who if they 
were masters of the coast, could take away their boats. 

101 A proof much stronger of the distance at which the 
first possessors of this island lived from the present time, 
is afforded by the stone heads of arrows, which are very 
frequently picked up. The people call them elf-bolts, 
and believe that the fairies shoot them at the cattle. 

102 The number of this little community has never been 
counted by its ruler, nor have I obtained any positive 
account, consistent with the result of political computa- 



106 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

tion. Not many years ago the late laird led out one 
hundred men upon a military expedition. The sixth 
part of a people is supposed capable of bearing arms : 
Raasay had therefore six hundred inhabitants. But 
because it is not likely that every man able to serve in 
the field would follow the summons, or that the chief 
would leave his lands totally defenseless, or take away 
all the hands qualified for labor, let it be supposed that 
half as many might be permitted to stay at home. 

103 Near the house at Raasay is a chapel, unroofed and 
ruinous, which has long been used only as a place of 
burial. About the churches in the islands are small 
squares inclosed with stone, which belong to particular 
families, as repositories for the dead. At Raasay there 
is one, I think, for the proprietor, and one for some col- 
lateral house. 

104 It has been, for many years, popular to talk of the 
lazy devotion of the Romish clergy ; over the sleepy 
laziness of men that erected churches we may indulge 
our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with 
the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall. 

Of the destruction of churches, the decay of religion 
must in time be the consequence ; for while the public 
acts of the ministry are now performed in houses, a very 
small number can be present; and as the greater part of 
the islanders make no use of books, all must necessarily 
live in total ignorance who want the opportunity of 
vocal instruction. 

105 From these remains of ancient sanctity, which are 
everywhere to be found, it has been conjectured that 
for the last two centuries the inhabitants of the islands 
have decreased in number. This argument, which sup- 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 107 

poses that the churches have been suffered to fall only 
because they were no longer necessary would have some 
force if the houses of worship still remaining were suffi- 
cient for the people. But since they have now no 
churches at all, these venerable fragments do not prove 
the people of former times to have been more numerous 
but to have been more devout. 

106 Raasay has little that can detain a traveler, except 
the laird and his family ; but their power wants no 
auxiliaries. Such a seat of hospitality, amidst the winds 
and waters, fills the imagination with a delightful con- 
trariety of images. Without is the rough ocean and the 
rocky land, the beating billows and the howling storm ; 
within is plenty and elegance, beauty and gaiety, the 
song and the dance. In Raasay, if I could have found 
an Ulysses, I had fancied a Phaeacia. 34 

DUNVEGAN. 

107 At Raasay, by good fortune, Macleod, so the chief 
of the clan is called, was paying a visit, and by him we 
were invited to his seat at Dunvegan. Raasay has a 
stout boat, built in Norway, in which, with six oars, he 
conveyed us back to Skye. We landed at Port Re, so 
called because James 35 the Fifth of Scotland, who had 
curiosity to visit the islands, came into it. The port is 
made by an inlet of the sea, deep and narrow, where a 
ship lay waiting to dispeople Skye, by carrying the 
natives away to America. 



M The last tarrying place of Ulysses, the hero of Homer's 
Odyssey, the king of Ithaca, the husband of Penelope. The Ph<ea- 
cians pitied Ulysses, and conveyed him home to Ithaca. 

:i0 Father of the brilliant but unfortunate Mary Queen of Scots. 
" Port Re " — the King's Gate. 



108 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

1 08 Here we dined at a public-house, I believe the only 
inn of the island, and having mounted our horses, trav- 
eled in the manner already described, till we came to 
Kingsborough, a place distinguished by that name, be- 
cause the king lodged here when he landed at Port Re. 
We were entertained with the usual hospitality by Mr. 
Macdonald and his lady Flora Macdonald, 36 a name that 
will be mentioned in history, and if courage and fidelity 
be virtues, mentioned with honor. She is a woman of 
middle stature, soft features, gentle manners, and elegant 
presence. 

109 In the morning we sent our horses round a promon- 
tory to meet us, and spared ourselves part of the day's 
fatigue, by crossing an arm of the sea. We had at last 
some difficulty in coming to Dunvegan ; for our way led 
over an extensive moor, where every step was to be taken 
with caution, and we were often obliged to alight, because 
the ground could not be trusted. 

no To Dunvegan we came, very willing to be at rest, 
and found our fatigue amply recompensed by our recep- 
tion. Lady Macleod, who had lived many years in Eng- 
land, was newly come hither with her son and four 
daughters, who knew all the arts of southern elegance, 
and all the modes of English economy. Here therefore 
we settled, and did not spoil the present hour with 
thoughts of departure. 

in Here the violence of the weather confined us for 
some time, not at all to our discontent or inconvenience. 
We would indeed very willingly have visited the islands, 



38 The escape of " Prince Charlie" after his defeat, 1746, by the 
Duke of Cumberland, at the battle of Culloden, is said to be largely 
due to the bravery of Flora Macdonald. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 109 

which might be seen from the house scattered in the 
sea, and I was particularly desirous to have viewed Isay ; 
but the storms did not permit us to launch a boat, and 
we were condemned to listen in idleness to the wind, 
except when we were better engaged by listening to the 
ladies. 

112 We had here more wind than waves, and suffered 
the severity of a tempest, without enjoying its magnifi- 
cence. The sea being broken by the multitude of islands, 
does not roar with so much noise, nor beat the storm with 
such foamy violence as I have remarked on the coast of 
Sussex. Though, while I was in the Hebrides, the wind 
was extremely turbulent, I never saw very high billows. 

The country about Dunvegan is rough and barren. 
There are no trees, except in the orchard, which is a low 
sheltered spot, surrounded with a wall. 

113 It is usual to call gentlemen in Scotland by the name 
of their possessions, as Raasay, Bernera, Loch Buy, a 
practice necessary in countries inhabited by clans, where 
all that live in the same territory have one name, and 
must be therefore discriminated by some addition. 

114 The little island of Muck, south of Skye, is of con- 
siderable value. It is two English miles long, and three 
quarters of a mile broad, and consequently contains only 
nine hundred and sixty English acres. It is chiefly ara- 
ble. Half of this little dominion the laird retains in 
his own hand, and on the other half, live one hundred 
and sixty persons, who pay their rent by exported corn. 
What rent they pay we were not told, and could not 
decently 37 inquire. The proportion of the people to the 

37 properly. 



no A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

land is such as the most fertile countries do not com- 
monly maintain. 

115 At Dunvegan I had tasted lotus, 38 and was in danger 
of forgetting that I was ever to depart, till Mr. Boswell 
sagely reproached me with my sluggishness and softness. 
I had no very forcible defense to make ; and we agreed 
to pursue our journey. Macleod accompanied us to 
Ulinish, where we were entertained by the sheriff of 
the island. 

ULINISH. 

116 Mr. Macqueen traveled with us, and directed our at- 
tention to all that was worthy of observation. With him 
we went to see an ancient building, called a dun or 
borough. 

If it was ever roofed, it might once have been a 
dwelling, but as there is no provision for water, it could 
not have been a fortress. In Skye, as in every other 
place, there is an ambition of exalting whatever has 
survived memory, to some important use, and referring 
it to very remote ages. I am inclined to suspect, that 
in lawless times, when the inhabitants of every mountain 
stole the cattle of their neighbor, these inclosures were 
used to secure the herds and the flocks in the night. 

117 We were then told of a cavern by the sea-side, re- 
markable for the powerful reverberation of sounds. 
After dinner we took a boat to explore this curious 
cavity. The boatmen, who seemed to be of a rank above 
that of the common drudges, inquired who the strangers 



38 According to an old fable, the traveler who ate the leaf of the 
lotus forgot his home, or, at least, didn't care to return. " The 
Chamber of Peers in England is the dormitory of freedom and of 
genius. Those who enter it have eaten the lotus, and forget their 
country." — Landor. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON in 

were, and being told we came, one from Scotland, and the 
other from England, asked if the Englishman could 
recount a long genealogy. What answer was given them, 
the conversation being in Erse, I was not much inclined 
to examine. 

They expected no good event of the voyage ; for one 
of them declared that he heard the cry of an English 
ghost. This omen I was not told till after our return, 
and therefore cannot claim the dignity of despising it. 

118 The sea was smooth. We never left the shore, and 
came without any disaster to the cavern, which we found 
rugged and misshapen, about one hundred and eighty 
feet long, thirty wide in the broadest part, and in the 
loftiest, as we guessed, about thirty high. It was now 
dry, but at high water the sea rises in it near six feet. 
Here I saw what I had never seen before, limpets and 
mussels in their natural state. But, as a new testimony 
to the veracity of common fame, here was no echo to be 
heard. 

119 We then walked through a natural arch in the rock, 
which might have pleased us by its novelty, had the 
stones, which encumbered our feet, given us leisure to 
consider it. We were shown the gummy seed of the kelp, 
that fastens itself to a stone, from which it grows into a 
strong stalk. 

In our return we found a little boy upon the point of 
a rock, catching with an angle a supper for the family. 
We rowed up to him, and borrowed his rod, with which 
Mr. Boswell caught a cuddy. 

TALISKER IN SKYE. 

120 From Ulinish our next stage was to Talisker, the 
house of Colonel Macleod, an officer in the Dutch service, 



ii2 A JOURXEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

who in this time of universal peace, has for several years 
been permitted to be absent from his regiment. Having 
been bred to physic, he is consequently a scholar, and his 
lady, by accompanying him in his different places of 
residence, is become skillful in several languages. Talis- 
ker is the place beyond all that I have seen, from which 
the gay and the jovial seem utterly excluded ; and where 
the hermit might expect to grow old in meditation, with- 
out possibility of disturbance or interruption. It is 
situated very near the sea, but upon a coast where no 
vessel lands but when it is driven by a tempest on 
the rocks. Toward the land are lofty hills streaming 
with waterfalls. The garden is sheltered by firs or 
pines, which grow there so prosperous, that some, which 
the present inhabitant planted, are very high and thick. 
121 At this place we very happily met with Air. Donald 
Maclean, a young gentleman, the eldest son of the laird 
of Col, heir to a very great extent of land, and so de- 
sirous of improving his inheritance that he spent a con- 
siderable time among the farmers of Hertfordshire and 
Hampshire, to learn their practice. He worked with his 
own hands at the principal operations of agriculture, that 
he might not deceive himself by a false opinion of skill, 
which if he should find it deficient at home, he had no 
means of completing. If the world has agreed to praise 
the travel and manual labors of the czar 39 of Muscovy, 
let Col have his share of the like applause, in the pro- 
portion of his dominions to the empire of Russia. 

This young gentleman was sporting in the mountains 
of Skve, and when he was wearv with following his 



39 Peter the Great, who went to Holland and learned ship- 
building. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 113 

game, repaired for lodging to Talisker. At night he 
missed one of his dogs, and when he went to seek him 
in the morning, found two eagles feeding on his carcass. 

122 Col, for he must be named by his possessions, hear- 
ing that our intention was to visit Iona, offered to con- 
duct us to his chief, Sir Allan Maclean, who lived in the 
isle of Inch Kenneth, and would readily find us a con- 
venient passage. From this time was formed an acquaint- 
ance which, being begun by kindness, was accidentally 
continued by constraint ; we derived much pleasure from 
it, and I hope have given him no reason to repent it. 

The weather was now almost one continued storm, 
and we were to snatch some happy intermission to be 
conveyed to Mull, the third island of the Hebrides, lying 
about a degree south of Skye, whence we might easily 
find our way to Inch Kenneth, where Sir Allan Maclean 
resided, and afterward to Iona. 

OSTIG IN SKYE. 

123 At Ostig, of which Mr. Macpherson is minister, we 
were entertained for some days, then removed to Armidel, 
where we finished our observations on the island of Skye. 

As this island lies in the fifty-seventh degree' the air 
cannot be supposed to have much warmth. The long 
continuance of the sun above the horizon does indeed 
sometimes produce great heat in northern latitudes ; but 
this can only happen in sheltered places, where the at- 
mosphere is to a certain extent stagnant, and the same 
mass of air continues to receive for many hours the rays 
of the sun and the vapors of the earth. Skye lies open 
on the west and north to a vast extent of ocean, and is 
cooled in the summer by a perpetual ventilation, but by 



ii4 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

the same blasts is kept warm in winter. Their weather 
is not pleasing. Half the year is deluged with rain. 
From the autumnal to the vernal equinox, a dry day is 
hardly known, except when the showers are suspended by 
a tempest. Under such skies can be expected no great 
exuberance of vegetation. Their winter overtakes their 
summer, and their harvest lies upon the ground drenched 
with rain. The autumn struggles hard to produce some 
of our early fruits. I gathered gooseberries in Septem- 
ber; but they were small, and the husk was thick. 

124 The winter is seldom such as puts a full stop to the 
growth of plants, or reduces the cattle to live wholly on 
the surplusage of the summer. In the year seventy-one 
they had a severe season, remembered by the name of the 
Black Spring, from which the island has not yet recov- 
ered. The snow lay long upon the ground, a calamity 
hardly known before. There are many bogs or mosses 
of greater, or less extent, where the soil cannot be sup- 
posed to want depth, though it is too wet for the plow. 
But we did not observe in these any aquatic plants. The 
valleys and the mountains are alike darkened with heath. 
Some grass, however, grows here and there, and some 
happier spots of earth are capable of tillage. 

125 Their agriculture is laborious, and perhaps rather 
feeble than unskillful. Their chief manure is seaweed 
which, when they lay it to rot upon the field, gives them 
a better crop than those of the Highlands. They heap 
seashells upon the dunghill, which in time molder into 
a fertilizing substance. When they find a vein of earth 
where they cannot use it, they dig it up, and add it to 
the mold of a more commodious place. 

126 The barns of Skye I never saw. That which Mac- 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 115 

leod of Raasay had erected near his house was so con- 
trived, because the harvest is seldom brought home dry, 
as by perpetual perflation 40 to prevent the mow from 
heating. 

Of their gardens I can judge only from their ta- 
bles. I did not observe that the common greens were 
wanting, and suppose, that by choosing an advantageous 
exposition, they can raise all the more hardy esculent 41 
plants. Of vegetable fragrance or beauty they are not 
yet studious. 42 Few vows are made to Flora 43 in the 
Hebrides. 

They gather a little hay ; but the grass is mown 
late, and is so often almost dry and again very wet, 
before it is housed, that it becomes a collection of with- 
ered stalks without taste or fragrance. 

127 The cattle of Skye are not so small as is commonly 
believed. Since they have sent their beeves in great 
numbers to southern marts, they have probably taken 
more care of their breed. At stated times the annual 
growth of cattle is driven to a fair by a general drover, 
and with the money, which he returns to the farmer, the 
rents are paid. 

Of their black cattle some are without horns, called 
by the Scots humble cows, as we call a bee a humble 
bee that wants a sting. 

128 Their horses are, like their cows, of a moderate size. 
I had no difficulty to mount myself commodiously by the 
favor of the gentlemen. 

40 ventilation. 41 eatable. 

42 concerned. 

43 " When Flora with her fragrant flowers 

Bedekt the earth so trim and gay." 

— From the ballad, "Sir Andrew Barton." 



n6 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

The goat is the general inhabitant of the earth, com- 
plying with every difference of climate and of soil. 

In the penury of these malignant regions, nothing is 
left that can be converted to food. The goats and the 
sheep are milked like the cows. A single meal° 44 of a goat 
is a quart, and of a sheep a pint. Such at least was the 
account, which I could extract from those of whom I am 
not sure that they ever had inquired. 

The milk of goats is much thinner than that of cows, 
and that of sheep is much thicker. Sheep's milk is never 
eaten before it is boiled ; as it is thick, it must be very 
liberal of curd, and the people of St. Kilda form it into 
small cheeses. 

129 Man is by the use of firearms made so much an over- 
match for other animals that in all countries, where they 
are in use, the wild part of the creation sensibly dimin- 
ishes. There will probably not be long either stags or 
roebucks in the islands. All the beasts of chase would 
have been lost long ago in countries well inhabited had 
they not been preserved by laws for the pleasure of the 
rich. 

130 There are in Skye neither rats nor mice, but the 
weasel is so frequent that he is heard in houses rattling 
behind chests or beds, as rats in England. They prob- 
ably owe to his predominance that they have no other 
vermin, for since the great rat took possession of this 
part of the world, scarce a ship can touch at any port 
but some of his race are left behind. They have within 
these few years begun to infest the isle of Col, where, 
being left by some trading vessel, they have increased 
for want of weasels to oppose them. 

4 - Amount given at a " milking." 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 117 

131 The inhabitants of Skye, and of the other islands 
which I have seen, are commonly of the middle stature, 
with fewer among- them very tall or very short than are 
seen in England. 

The ladies have as much beauty here as in other 
places, but bloom and softness are not to be expected 
among the lower classes, whose faces are exposed to the 
rudeness of the climate, and whose features are some- 
times contracted by want, and sometimes hardened by 
the blasts. Supreme beauty is seldom found in cottages 
or workshops, even where no real hardships are suf- 
fered. To expand the human face to its full perfection, 
it seems necessary that the mind should co-operate by 
placidness of content, or consciousness of superiority. 

132 Their strength is proportionate to their size, but 
they are accustomed to run upon rough ground, and 
therefore can with great agility skip over the bog or 
clamber the mountain. For a campaign 43 in the wastes 
of America, soldiers better qualified could not have been 
found. Having little work to do, they are not willing 
nor perhaps able to endure a long continuance of manual 
labor, and are therefore considered as habitually idle. 

133 It is generally supposed that life is longer in places 
where there are few opportunities of luxury ; but I found 
no instance here of extraordinary longevity. A cottager 
grows old over his oaten cakes, like a citizen at a turtle 
feast. He is indeed seldom incommoded by corpulence. 
Poverty preserves him from sinking under the burden of 
himself, but he escapes no other injury of time. Instances 
of long life are often related, which those who hear them 
are more willing to credit than examine. To be told 

lj What war had Johnson in mind ? 



n8 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

that any man has attained a hundred years gives hope 
and comfort to him who stands trembling on the brink 
of his own climacteric. 40 

134 Length of life is distributed impartially to very dif- 
ferent modes of life in very different climates; and the 
mountains have no greater examples of age and health 
than the lowlands, where I was introduced to two ladies 
of high quality ; one of whom, in her ninety- fourth year, 
presided at her table with the full exercise of all her 
powers ; and the other has attained her eighty-fourth, 
without any diminution of her vivacity, and with little 
reason to accuse time of depredations on her beauty. 

135 In the islands, as in most other places, the inhab- 
itants are of different rank, and one does not encroach 
here upon another. Since money has been brought 
amongst them, they have found, like others, the art of 
spending more than, they receive ; and I saw with grief 
the chief of a very ancient clan, whose island was con- 
demned by law to be sold for the satisfaction of his 
creditors. 

136 The name of highest in dignity is laird, of which 
there are in the extensive isle of Skye only three, Mac- 
donald, Macleod, and Mackinnon. The laird is the origi- 
nal owner of the land, whose natural power must be very 
great where no man lives but by agriculture. The laird 
has all those in his power that live upon his farms. 
Kings can, for the most part, only exalt or degrade. The 
laird at pleasure can feed or starve, can give bread or 
withhold it. This inherent power was yet strengthened 
by the kindness of consanguinity, and the reverence of 



His sixty-fourth year. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 119 

patriarchal authority. The laird was the father of the 
clan, and his tenants commonly bore his name. 

137 This multifarious and extensive obligation operated 
with force scarcely credible. Every duty, moral or 
political, was absorbed in affection and adherence to the 
chief. Not many years have passed since the clans knew 
no law but the laird's will. He told them to whom they 
should be friends or enemies, what king they should obey,, 
and what religion they should profess. 

138 As the mind must govern the hands, so in every 
society the man of intelligence must direct the man of 
labor. 47 The laird, in these wide estates, which often 
consist of islands remote from one another, cannot extend 
his personal influence to all his tenants ; and the steward, 
having no dignity annexed to his character, can have 
little authority among men taught to pay reverence only 
to birth, and who regard the tacksman 48 as their hered- 
itary superior. 

139 The only gentlemen in the islands are the lairds, the 
tacksmen, and the ministers, who frequently improve 
their livings by becoming farmers. If the tacksmen be 
banished, who will be left to impart knowledge or impress 
civility? The laird must always be at a distance from 
the greater part of his lands ; and if he resides at all 
upon them, must drag his days in solitude, having no 



" It is related that Dr. Johnson added a few lines to Goldsmith's 
The Traveller. Either may have written this couplet : — 
" For just experience tells, in every soil, 
That those who think must govern those that toil." 
48 A large taker or leaseholder of land, of which he keeps part 
and lets part to undertenants. These " tacks," or subordinate pos- 
sessions, were long considered hereditary. The tacksman held a 
middle station between the higher and lower order. 



120 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

longer either a friend or a companion; he will therefore 
depart to some more comfortable residence, and leave the 
tenants to the wisdom and mercy of a factor. 

140 The condition of domestic servants or the price of 
occasional labor I do not know with certainty. I was 
told that the maids have sheep, and are allowed to spin 
for their own clothing; perhaps they have no pecuniary 
wages, or none but in very wealthy families. 

141 Such is the system of insular subordination, which 
having little variety cannot afford much delight in the 
view, nor long detain the mind in contemplation. The 
inhabitants were for a long time, perhaps, not unhappy ; 
but their content was a muddy mixture of pride and 
ignorance, an indifference for pleasures which they did 
not know, a blind veneration for their chiefs, and a strong 
conviction of .their own importance. 

142 That dignity which they derived from, an opinion of 
their military importance, the law which disarmed them 
has abated. An old gentleman, delighting himself with 
the recollection of better days, related that forty years 
ago a chieftain walked out attended by ten or twelve 
followers with their arms rattling. That animating rab- 
ble has now ceased. The chief has lost his formidable 
retinue, and the Highlander walks his heath unarmed and 
defenseless, with the peaceable submission of a French 
peasant or English cottager. 

143 Their ignorance grows every day less, but their 
knowledge is yet of little other use than to show them 
their wants. They are now in the period of education, 
and feel the uneasiness of discipline without yet perceiv- 
ing the benefit of instruction. 

144 The last law, by which the Highlanders are deprived 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 121 

of their arms, has operated with efficacy beyond expecta- 
tion. Of former statutes made with the same design, 
the execution has been feeble and the effect inconsider- 
able. Concealment was undoubtedly practiced, and per- 
haps often with connivance. There was tenderness or 
partiality on one side, and obstinacy on the other. But 
the law which followed the victory of Culloden 49 found 
the whole nation dejected and intimidated; informations 
were given without danger and without fear, and the 
arms were collected with such rigor that every house 
was despoiled of its defense. 

145 To disarm part of the Highlands could give no rea- 
sonable occasion of complaint. Every government must 
be allowed the power of taking away the weapon that is 
lifted against it. But the loyal clans murmured with 
some appearance of justice, that, after having defended 
the king, they were forbidden for the future to defend 
themselves, and that the sword should be forfeited which 
had been legally employed. 

146 It affords a generous and manly pleasure to conceive 
a little nation gathering its fruits and tending its herds 
with fearless confidence, though it lies open on every 
side to invasion, where, in contempt of walls and trenches 
every man sleeps securely with his sword beside him ; 
where all on the first approach of hostility came together 
at the call of battle as at a summons to a festal show ; 
and committing their cattle to the care of those whom 
age or nature has disabled, engage the enemy with that 



43 In 1746, the grandson of the deposed James II. made an 
attempt to gain the throne and send George II. back to Hanover. 
This last effort of the Stuarts was crushed at the battle of Culloden. 
Ihe story is vividly told in Scott's Waverley. 



122 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

competition for hazard and for glory which operate in 
men that fight under the eye of those whose dislike or 
kindness they have always considered as the greatest 
evil or the greatest good. 

147 This was, in the beginning of the present century, 
the state of the Highlands. Every man was a soldier, 
who partook of national confidence and interested himself 
in national honor. To lose this spirit is to lose what no 
small advantage will compensate, 

148 It may likewise deserve to be inquired whether a 
great nation ought to be totally commercial ; whether, 
amidst the uncertainty of human affairs, too much atten- 
tion to one mode of happiness may not endanger others. 

149 It must, however, be confessed that a man who 
places honor only in successful violence is a very trouble- 
some and pernicious animal in time of peace, and that 
the martial character cannot prevail in a whole people 
but by the diminution of all other virtues. 

150 The power of deciding controversies and of pun- 
ishing offenses, as some such power there must always 
be, was intrusted to the lairds of the country, to those 
whom the people considered as their natural judges. It 
cannot be supposed that a rugged proprietor of the rocks, 
unprincipled and unenlightened, was a nice 50 resolver of 
entangled claims, or very exact in proportioning punish- 
ment to offenses. But the more he indulged his own will, 
the more he held his vassals in dependence. Prudence 
and innocence, without the favor of the chief, conferred 
no security ; and crimes involved no danger when the 
judge was resolute to acquit. 



50 careful, particular. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 123 

151 In all greater questions, however, there is now hap- 
pily an end to all fear or hope from malice or from 
favor. The roads are secure in those places through 
which, forty years ago, no traveler could pass without a 
convoy. 51 All trials of right by the swords are forgotten, 
and the mean are in as little danger from the powerful 
as in other places. No scheme of policy has in any coun- 
try yet brought the rich and poor on equal terms into 
courts of judicature. Perhaps experience improving on 
experience may in time effect it. 

152 Those who have long enjoyed dignity and power 
ought not to lose it without some equivalent. There was 
paid to the chiefs by the public, in exchange for their 
privileges, perhaps a sum greater than most of them 
had ever possessed, which excited a thirst for riches of 
which it showed them the use. When the power of birth 
and station ceases, no hope remains but from the preva- 
lence of money. Power and wealth supply the place of 
each other. Power confers the ability of gratifying our 
desire without the consent of others. Wealth enables us 
to obtain the consent of others to our gratification. 
Power, simply considered, whatever it confers on one, 
must take from another. Wealth enables its owner to 
give to others by taking only from himself. Power 
pleases the violent and proud : wealth delights the placid 
and the timorous. Youth, therefore, flies at power, and 
age grovels after riches. 

J 53 There seems now, whatever be the cause, to be 
through a great part of the Highlands a general discon- 
tent. That adherence which was lately professed by every 
man to the chief of his name has now little prevalence ; 

61 guard. 



i2 4 'A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

and he that cannot live as he desires at home listens to 
the tale of fortunate islands and happy regions, where 
every man may have land of his own, and eat the product 
of his labor without a superior. 

154 Those who have obtained grants of American lands 
have, as is well known, invited settlers from all quarters 
of the globe; and among other places, where oppression 
might produce a wish for new habitations, their emis- 
saries would not fail to try their persuasions in the isles 
of Scotland, where at the time when the clans were newly 
disunited from their chiefs, and exasperated" by unprece- 
dented exactions, it is no wonder that they prevailed. 

155 Whether the mischiefs of emigration were immedi- 
ately perceived may be justly questioned. They who 
went first were probably such as could best be spared; 
but the accounts sent by the earliest adventurers, whether 
true or false, inclined many to follow them, and whole 
neighborhoods formed parties for removal, so that de- 
parture from their native country is no longer exile. He 
that goes thus accompanied carries with him all that 
makes life pleasant. He sits down in a better climate, 
surrounded by his kindred and his friends : they carry 
with them their language, their opinions, their popular 
songs, and hereditary merriment: they change nothing 
but the place of their abode, and of that change they per- 
ceive the benefit. 

156 This is the real effect of emigration if those that go 
away together settle on the same spot and preserve their 
ancient union. But some relate that these adventurous 
visitants of unknown regions, after a voyage passed in 
dreams of plenty and felicity, are dispersed at last upon 
a sylvan wilderness, where their first years must be spent 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 125 

in toil to clear the ground which is afterward to be 
tilled, and that the whole effect of their undertaking is 
only more fatigue and equal scarcity. 

157 Both accounts may be suspected. Those who are 
gone will endeavor by every art to draw others after 
them ; for as their numbers are greater, they will provide 
better for themselves. When Nova Scotia was first peo- 
pled, 52 I remember a letter, published under the character 
of a New Planter, who related how much the climate put 
him in mind of Italy. Such intelligence the Hebridians 
probably receive from their transmarine correspondents. 
But with equal temptations of interest, and perhaps with 
no greater niceness of veracity, the owners of the islands 
spread stories of American hardships to keep their people 
content at home. 

158 Some method to stop this epidemic desire of wander- 
ing, which spreads its contagion from valley to valley, 
deserves to be sought with great diligence. In more 
fruitful countries, the removal of one only makes room 
for the succession of another : but in the Hebrides, the 
loss of an inhabitant leaves a lasting vacuity. 

159 Let it be inquired, whether the first intention of those 
who are fluttering on the wing, and collecting a flock 
that they may take their flight, be to attain good, or to 
avoid evil? If they are dissatisfied with that part of the 
globe which their birth has allotted them, and resolve not 
to live without the pleasures of happier climates ; if they 
long for bright suns, and calm skies, and flowery fields, 



02 It was first settled by the French in 1604, and named Arcadia. 
Later, it was settled by Scots, and named Nova Scotia. What popu- 
lar poem had its origin in the struggle between England and France 
for possession ? 



126 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

and fragrant gardens, I know not by what eloquence they 
can be persuaded, or by what offers they can be hired, to 
stay. 

1 60 But if they are driven from their native country by 
positive evils, and disgusted by ill treatment, real or 
imaginary, it were fit to remove their grievances, and 
quiet their resentment; since, if they have been hitherto 
undutiful subjects, they will not much mend their prin- 
ciples by American conversation. 03 

161 To allure them into the army, it was thought proper 
to indulge them in the continuance of their national 
dress. If this concession could have any effect, it might 
easily be made. That dissimilitude of appearance, which 
was supposed to keep them distinct from the rest of the 
nation, might disincline them from coalescing with the 
Pennsylvanians or people of Connecticut. If the restitu- 
tion of their arms will reconcile them to their country, 
let them have again those weapons, which will not be 
more mischievous at home than in the Colonies. That 
they may not fly from the increase of rent, I know not 
whether the general good does not require that the land- 
lords be, for a time, restrained in their demands, and kept 
quiet by pensions proportionate to their loss. 

162 To hinder insurrection by driving away the people, 
and to govern peaceably by having no subjects, is an ex- 
pedient that argues no great profundity of politics. To 
soften the obdurate, to convince the mistaken, to mollify 
the resentful, are worthy of a statesman ; but it affords a 
legislator little self-applause to consider that, where there 
was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness. 



53 Mingling with the Americans. The Doctor did not approve 
of the rebellious sentiments of the Colonists. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 127 

163 England has for several years been filled with the 
achievements of seventy thousand Highlanders employed 
in America. I have heard from an English officer, not 
much inclined to favor them, that their behavior de- 
served a very high degree of military praise; but their 
number has been much exaggerated. One of the minis- 
ters told me that seventy thousand men could not have 
been found in all the Highlands, and that more than 
twelve thousand never took the field. Those that went 
to the American war went to destruction. Of the old 
Highland regiment, consisting of twelve hundred, only 
seventy-six survived to see their country again. 

164 The habitations of men in the Hebrides may be dis- 
tinguished into huts and houses. By a house, I mean a 
building with one story over another ; by a hut, a dwell- 
ing with only one floor. The laird, who formerly lived 
in a castle, now lives in a house ; sometimes sufficiently 
neat, but seldom very spacious or splendid. The tacks- 
men and the ministers have commonly houses. Wher- 
ever there is a house, the stranger finds a welcome, and 
to the other evils of exterminating tacksmen may be 
added the unavoidable cessation of hospitality, or the 
devolution T,i of too heavy a burden on the ministers. 

165 The house and the furniture are not always nicely 
suited. 55 We were driven once, by missing a passage, 
to the hut of a gentleman, where, after a very liberal 
supper, when I was conducted to my chamber, I found an 
elegant bed of Indian cotton, spread with fine sheets. 
The accommodation was flattering ; I undressed myself, 
and felt my feet in the mire. The bed stood upon the 



64 letting down. 

60 adapted to each other. 



i 2 8 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

bare earth, which a long course of rain had softened to 
a puddle. 

1 66 In pastoral countries the condition of the lowest rank 
of people is sufficiently wretched. Among manufacturers, 
men that have no property may have art and industry, 
which make them necessary, and therefore valuable. But 
where flocks and corn are the only wealth, there are 
always more hands than work, and of that work there is 
little in which skill and dexterity can be much distin- 
guished. He therefore who is born poor never can be 
rich. The son merely occupies the place of the father, 
and life knows nothing of progression or advancement. 

The petty tenants, and laboring peasants, live in mis- 
erable cabins, which afford them little more than shelter 
from the storms. 

167 Their food is not better than their lodging. They 
seldom taste the flesh of land animals ; for here are no 
markets. What each man eats is from his own stock. 
The great effect of money is to break property into small 
parts. In towns, he that has a shilling may have a piece 
of meat; but where there is no commerce, no man can 
eat mutton but by killing a sheep. 

Fish in fair weather they need not want ; but, I be- 
lieve, man never lives long on fish, but by constraint ; 
he will rather feed upon roots and berries. 

168 The only fuel of the islands is peat. Their wood is 
all consumed, and coal they have not yet found. Peat is 
dug out of the marshes, from the depth of one foot to 
that of six. That is accounted the best which is nearest 
the surface. It appears to be a mass of black earth held 
together by vegetable fibers. I know not whether the 
earth be bituminous, or whether the fibers be not the 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 129 

only combustible part, which, by heating the interposed 
earth red hot, make a burning mass. The heat is not 
very strong nor lasting. The ashes are yellowish, and in 
a large quantity. When they dig peat, they cut it into 
square pieces, and pile it up to dry beside the house. In 
some places it has an offensive smell. It is like wood 
charked for the smith. The common method of making 
peat fires is by heaping it on the hearth ; but it burns 
well in grates, and in the best houses is so used. 

169 The islands afford few pleasures, except to the hardy 
sportsman, who can tread the moor and climb the moun- 
tain. The distance of one family from another, in a 
country where traveling has so much difficulty, makes 
frequent intercourse impracticable. Visits last several 
days, and are commonly paid by water; yet I never saw 
a boat furnished with benches, or made commodious by 
any addition to the first fabric. Conveniences are not 
missed where they never were enjoyed. 

170 The solace which the bagpipe can give they have 
long enjoyed ; but among other changes, which the last 
revolution introduced, the use of the bagpipe begins to 
be forgotten. Some of the chief families still entertain 
a piper, whose office was anciently hereditary. Macrim- 
mon was a piper to Macleod, and Rankin to Maclean of 
Col. 

171 The tunes of the bagpipe are traditional. There has 
been in Skye, beyond all time of memory, a college of 
pipers under the direction of Macrimmon, which is not 
quite extinct. I have had my dinner exhilarated by the 
bagpipe at Armidel, at Dunvegan, and at Col. 

172 The religion of the islands is that of the kirk of Scot- 
land. The gentlemen with whom I conversed are all 

9 



130 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

inclined to the English liturgy ; but they are obliged 
to maintain the established minister, and the country is 
too poor to afford payment to another, who must live 
wholly on the contribution of his audience. 

173 The ancient rigor of puritanism is now very much 
relaxed, though all are not yet equally enlightened. I 
sometimes met with prejudices sufficiently malignant, 
but they were prejudices of ignorance. The ministers in 
the islands had attained such knowledge as may justly be 
admired in men, who have no motive to study but 
generous curiosity, or, what is still better, desire of use- 
fulness ; with such politeness as so narrow a circle of 
converse could not have supplied, but to minds naturally 
disposed to elegance. 

174 Reason and truth will prevail at last. The most 
learned of the Scottish doctors would now gladly admit a 
form of prayer, if the people would endure it. The zeal 
or rage of congregations has its different degrees. In 
some parishes the Lord's Prayer is suffered : in others it 
is still rejected as a form, and he that should make it 
part of his supplication would be suspected of heretical 
pravity. 

175 The principle upon which extemporary prayer was 
originally introduced is no longer admitted. The min- 
ister formerly, in the effusion of his prayer, expected 
immediate, and perhaps perceptible inspiration, and 
therefore thought it his duty not to think before what he 
should say. It is now universally confessed that men 
pray as they speak on other occasions, according to the 
general measure of their abilities and attainments. 

176 The political tenets 56 of the-islanders I was not curious 

60 doctrines or beliefs one holds. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 131 

to investigate, and they were not eager to obtrude. Their 
conversation is decent and inoffensive. They disdain to 
drink for their principles, and there is no disaffection at 
their tables. I never heard a health offered by a High- 
lander that might not have circulated with propriety 
within the precincts of the king's palace. 

177 Legal government has yet something of novelty to 
which they cannot perfectly conform. The ancient spirit 
that appealed only to the sword is yet among them. The 
tenant of Scalpa, an island belonging to Macdonald, 
took no care to bring his rent ; when the landlord talked 
of exacting payment, he declared his resolution to keep 
his ground and drive all intruders from the island, and 
continued to feed his cattle as on" his own land, till it 
became necessary for the sheriff to dislodge him by vio- 
lence. 

178 The various kinds of superstition which prevailed 
here, as in all other regions of ignorance, are by the dili- 
gence of the ministers almost extirpated. 

Of Brownie, nothing has been heard for many years. 
Brownie was a sturdy fairy, who, if he was fed and 
kindly treated, would, as they said, do a great deal of 
work. They now pay him no wages, and are content to 
labor for themselves. 

In Troda, within these three and thirty years, milk 
was put every Saturday for Greogach, or the Old Man 
with the Long Beard. Whether Greogach was courted as 
kind, or dreaded as terrible, whether they meant, by giv- 
ing him the milk, to obtain good or avert evil, I was not 
informed. The minister is now living by whom the prac- 
tice was abolished. 

179 They have opinions which cannot be ranked with 



132 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

superstition, because they regard only natural effects. 
They expect better crops of grain, by sowing their seed 
in the moon's increase. The moon has great influence in 
vulgar 57 philosophy. In my memory it was a precept 
annually given in one of the English almanacs, " to kill 
hogs when the moon was increasing, and the bacon 
would prove the better in boiling." 58 

1 80 We should have had little claim to the praise of 
curiosity, 59 if we had not endeavored with particular 
attention to examine the question of the Second Sight. 60 
Of an opinion received for centuries by a whole nation, 
and supposed to be confirmed through its whole descent 
by a series of successive facts, it is desirable that the 
truth should be established, or the fallacy detected. 

181 The Second Sight is an impression made either by 
the mind upon the eye or by the eye upon the mind, by 
which things distant or future are perceived and seen as 
if they were present. A man on a journey far from 
home falls from his horse ; another, who is perhaps at 
work about the house, sees him bleeding on the ground, 
commonly with a landscape of the place where the acci- 
dent befalls him. Things distant are seen at the instant 
when they happen. Of things future I know not that 
there is any rule for determining the time between the 
sight and the event. 

182 This receptive faculty, for power it cannot be called, 
is neither voluntary nor constant. The appearances have 



67 common. This is still true. 

68 That " almanack " is not completely out of date in America. 

69 A commendable love of knowledge. 

60 "That bards are second sighted is no joke, 
And ken the lingo of the spiritual folk." 

— * Burns, 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 133 

no dependence upon choice: they cannot be summoned, 
detained, or recalled. The impression is sudden, and 
the effect often painful. 

183 By pretensions to Second Sight, no profit was ever 
sought or gained. It is an involuntary affection, in 
which neither hope nor fear are known to have any part. 
Those who profess to feel it do not boast of it as a privi- 
lege, nor are considered by others as advantageously dis- 
tinguished. They have no temptation to feign, and their 
hearers have no motive to encourage, the imposture. 

184 To talk with any of these seers is not easy. There 
is one living in Skye, with whom we would have gladly 
conversed ; but he was very gross and ignorant, and 
knew no English. The proportion in these countries of 
the poor to the rich is such, that if we suppose the 
quality to be accidental, it can very rarely happen to a 
man of education ; and yet on such men it has sometimes 
fallen. There is now a second-sighted gentleman in the 
Highlands, who complains of the terrors to which he is 
exposed. 

185 The foresight of the seers is not always prescience : 
they are impressed with images, of which the event only 
shows them the meaning. • They tell what they have seen 
to others, who are at that time not more knowing than 
themselves, but may become at last very adequate wit- 
nesses, by comparing the narrative with its verification. 

186 To collect sufficient testimonies for the satisfaction 
of the public, or of ourselves, would have required more 
time than we could bestow. There is against it, the 
seeming analogy of things confusedly seen, and little 
understood : and for it, the indistinct cry of national per- 
suasion, which may be perhaps resolved at last into preju- 



134 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

dice and tradition. I never could advance my curiosity 
to conviction; but came away at last only willing to 
believe. 

187 As there subsists no longer in the islands much of 
that peculiar and discriminative form of life, of which 
the idea had delighted our imagination, we were willing 
to listen to such accounts of past times as would be given 
us. But we soon found what memorials were to be ex- 
pected from an illiterate people, whose whole time is a 
series of distress ; where every morning is laboring with 
expedients for the evening; and where all mental pains 
or pleasure arose from the dread of winter, the expecta- 
tion of the spring, the caprices of their chiefs, and the 
motions of the neighboring clans. 

188 The chiefs, indeed, were exempt from urgent penury 
and daily difficulties ; and in their houses were preserved 
what accounts remained of past ages. But the chiefs 
were sometimes ignorant and careless, and sometimes 
kept busy by turbulence and contention ; and one gen- 
eration of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten 
history. 61 Books are faithful repositories, which may be 
awhile neglected or forgotten ; but when they are opened 
again, will again impart their instruction : memory, once 
interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a 
fixed luminary, which after the cloud that had hidden it 
has passed away, is again bright in its proper station. 
Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot 
be rekindled. 

189 It seems to be universally supposed, that much of the 



61 " The noblest written words are commonly as far behind or 
above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is 
behind the clouds." — Thoreau's Walden. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 135 

local history was preserved by the bards, of whom one 
is said to have been retained by every great family. 
After these bards were some of my first inquiries : and I 
received such answers as, for awhile, made me please 
myself with my increase of knowledge, for I had not then 
learned how to estimate the narration of a Highlander. 

190 They said that a great family had a bard and a 
senachie, who were the poet and historian of the house ; 
and an old gentleman told me that he remembered one 
of each. Here was a dawn of intelligence. 62 Of men 
that had lived within memory, some certain knowledge 
might be attained. Though the office had ceased, its 
effects might continue ; the poems might be found though 
there was no poet. 

191 Another conversation, indeed, informed me that the 
same man was both bard and senachie. This variation 
discouraged me ; but as the practice might be different 
in different times, or at the same time in different fami- 
lies, there was yet no reason for supposing that I must 
necessarily sit down in total ignorance. 

192 Soon after I was told by a gentleman, who is gen- 
erally acknowledged the greatest master of Hebridian 
antiquities, that there had indeed once been both bards 
and senachies ; and that senachie signified the man of 
talk or of conversation ; but that neither bard nor sen- 
achie had existed for some centuries. I have no reason 
to suppose it exactly known at what time the custom 
ceased, nor did it probably cease in all houses at once. 
But whenever the practice of recitation was disused, the 
works, whether poetical or historical, perished with the 



°- a beginning of knowledge. 



136 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

authors ; for in those times nothing had been written in 
the Erse language. 

193 Whether the man of talk was an historian, whose 
office was to tell truth, or a story-teller, like those which 
were in the last century, 63 and perhaps are now among 
the Irish, whose trade was only to amuse, it now would 
be vain to inquire. 

194 Most of the domestic offices were, I believe, heredi- 
tary ; and probably the laureate Gi of a clan was always 
the son of the last laureate. The history of the race could 
not otherwise be communicated or retained; but what 
genius could be expected in a poet by inheritance ? 65 

195 The payment of rent in kind has been so long dis- 
used in England, that it is totally forgotten. It was 
practiced very lately in the Hebrides, and probably still 
continues, not only at St. Kilda, 66 where money is not yet 
known, but in others of the smaller and remoter islands. 
It were perhaps to be desired, that no change in this 
particular should have been made. Money confounds 
subordination, by overpowering the distinctions of rank 
and birth, and weakens authority, by supplying power of 
resistance, or expedients for escape. The feudal 67 sys- 
tem is formed for a nation employed in agriculture, and 
has never long kept its hold where gold and silver have 
become common. 

196 After all that has been said of the force and terror 



63 This office has been revived. 

64 Who is the present laureate of the kingdom ? 

68 Yet Dr. Johnson would have stoutly defended the right of the 
eldest son of the king to succeed him, genius or no genius. 

66 Forty miles west of North Uist. 

67 A system by which the holding of an estate, or feud, was de- 
pendent upon military service to be paid the king or other superior. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 137 

of the Highland sword, I could not find that the art of 
defense was any part of common education. The gentle- 
men were perhaps sometimes skillful gladiators, but the 
common men had no other powers than .those of violence 
and courage. Yet it is well known that the onset of the 
Highlanders was very formidable. 

197 The Highland weapons gave opportunity for many 
exertions of personal courage, and sometimes for single 
combats in the field; like those which occur so fre- 
quently in fabulous wars. At Falkirk, a gentleman now 
living was, I suppose, after the retreat of the king's 
troops, engaged at a distance from the rest with an Irish 
dragoon. They were both skillful swordsmen, and the 
contest was not easily decided : the dragoon at last had 
the advantage, and the Highlander called for quarter ; 
but quarter was refused him, and the fight continued till 
he was reduced to defend himself upon his knee. At 
that instant one of the Macleods came to his rescue, who, 
as it is said, offered quarter to the dragoon ; but he thought 
himself obliged to reject what he had before refused, and, 
as battle, gives little time to deliberate, was immediately 
killed. 

198 Of the Erse language, as I understand nothing, I 
cannot say more than I have been told. It is the rude 
speech of a barbarous people who had few thoughts to 
express, and were content, as they conceived 68 grossly, 69 
to be grossly 69 understood. 70 After what has been lately 



68 thought. 

69 Without fine discrimination. 

70 Dr. Johnson sounds a note of defiance in the ears of those who 
believed that Ossian was a reality and that Macpherson only trans- 
lated Ossian's poems into English. Hugh Miller somewhere speaks 
of certain Erse poems as " translated from their original English," 



138 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

talked of Highland bards and Highland genius, many 
will startle when they are told that the Erse never was a 
written language ; that there is not in the world an Erse 
manuscript a hundred years old ; and that the sounds of 
the Highlanders were never expressed by letters till some 
little books of piety were translated, and a metrical ver- 
sion of the Psalms was made by the synod of Argyle. 
Whoever, therefore, now writes in this language spells 
according to his own perception of the sound and his 
own idea of the power of the letters. The Welsh and the 
Irish are cultivated tongues. The Welsh, two hundred 
years ago, insulted their English neighbors for the insta- 
bility of their orthography ; while the Erse merely floated 
in the breath of the people, and could therefore receive 
little improvement. 

199 When a language begins to teem with books, it is 
tending to refinement, as those who undertake to teach 
others must have undergone some Jabor in improving 
themselves ; they set a proportionate value on their own 
thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious ex- 
pressions ; speech becomes embodied and permanent ; 
different modes and phrases are compared, and the best 
obtains an establishment. By degrees one age improves 
upon another. Exactness is first obtained, and after- 
ward elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in 
its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind 
him, the new generations have all to learn. There may 
possibly be books without a polished language, but there 
can be no polished language without books. 

200 That the bards could not read more than the rest of 
their countrymen it is reasonable to suppose, because if 
they had read they could probably have written; and 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 139 

how high their compositions may reasonably be rated, an 
inquirer may best judge by considering what stores of 
imagery, what principles of ratiocination, 71 what com- 
prehension of knowledge, and what delicacy of elocution 
he has known any man attain who cannot read. The 
state of the bards was yet more hopeless. He that can- 
not read may now converse with those that can ; but the 
bard was a barbarian among barbarians, who, knowing 
nothing himself, lived with others that knew no more. 

201 In an unwritten speech, nothing that is not very 
short is transmitted from one generation to another. 
Few have opportunities of hearing a long composition 
often enough to learn it, or have inclination to repeat it 
so often as is necessary to retain it ; and what is once for- 
gotten is lost forever. I believe there cannot be recov- 
ered in the whole Erse language five hundred lines of 
which there is any evidence to prove them a hundred 
years old. Yet I hear that the father T2 of Ossian boasts 
of two chests more of ancient poetry, which he sup- 
presses, because they are too good for the English. 

202 He that goes into the Highlands with a mind natu- 
rally acquiescent, and a credulity eager for wonders, 
may come back with an opinion very different from 
mine ; for the inhabitants, knowing the ignorance of all 
strangers in their language and antiquities, perhaps are 
not very scrupulous adherents to truth ; yet I do not say 
that they deliberately speak studied falsehood, or have a 
settled purpose to deceive. 



71 reasoning. 

13 Macpherson, a Scotch poet, who is now generally believed to 
have composed in English what he claimed to have translated from 
the writings of an alleged Erse poet named Ossian. 



140 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

203 Mr. Boswell was very diligent in his inquiries; and 
the result of his investigations was, that the answer to 
the second question was commonly such as nullified the 
answer to the first. 

We were awhile told, that they had an old transla- 
tion of the Scriptures ; and told it till it would appear 
obstinacy to inquire again. Yet by continued accumula- 
tion of questions we found that the translation meant, 
if any meaning there were, was nothing else than the 
Irish Bible. 

We heard of manuscripts that were, or that had been, 
in the hands of somebody's father or grandfather; but 
at last we had no reason to believe they were other than 
Irish. 

204 I suppose my opinion 73 of the poems of Ossian is 
already discovered. I believe they never existed in any 
other form than that which we have seen. The editor, 
or author, never could show the original ; nor can it be 
shown by any other; to revenge reasonable incredulity, 
by refusing evidence, is a degree of insolence, with which 
the world is not yet acquainted ; and the stubborn audac- 
ity is the last refuge of guilt. It would be easy to 
show it if he had it; but whence could it be had? It 
is too long to be remembered, and the language formerly 
had nothing written. He has doubtless inserted names 
that circulated in popular stories, and may have trans- 
lated some wandering ballads, if any can be found; 
and the names, and some of the images, being recollected, 
make an inaccurate auditor imagine, by the help of 



73 Macpherson threatened to cane Johnson for the blunt expres- 
sion of his " opinion," but the sturdy Doctor provided himself with 
a cudgel, and the author of " Fingal " thought better of it. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 141 

Caledonian bigotry, that he has formerly heard the 
whole. 

205 I asked a very learned minister in Skye, who had 
used all arts to make me believe the genuineness of the 
book, whether at last he believed it himself? but he 
would not answer. He wished me to be deceived for 
the honor of his country, but would not directly and 
formally deceive me. Yet has this man's testimony 
been publicly produced, as of one that held " Fingal " 7i 
to be the work of Ossian. 

206 It is said, that some men of integrity profess to 
have heard parts of it, but they all heard them when 
they were boys ; and it was never said that any of them 
could recite six lines. They remember names, and 
perjiaps some proverbial sentiments ; and having no 
distinct ideas, coin a resemblance without an original. 
The persuasion 75 of the Scots, however, is far from 
universal ; and in a question so capable of proof, why 
should doubt be suffered to continue? The editor has 
been heard to say, that part of the poem was received 
by him in the Saxon character. He has then found, by 
some peculiar fortune, an unwritten language, written 
in a character which the natives probably never beheld. 76 

207 I have yet supposed no imposture but in the pub- 
lisher; yet I am far from certainty, that some trans- 
lations have not been lately made, that may now be 
obtruded as parts of the original work. Credulity on 
one part is a strong temptation to deceit on the other, 
especially to deceit of which no personal injury is the 



74 The leading character in Ossian's poems. 
73 Opinion, conviction, belief. 
76 Fine irony. 



1 42 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

consequence, and which flatters the author with his own 
ingenuity. The Scots have something to plead for 
their easy reception of an improbable fiction : they are 
seduced by their fondness for their supposed ancestors. 
A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist, who does 
not love Scotland better than truth ; he will always love 
it better than inquiry : and if falsehood flatters' his 
vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it. Neither 
ought the English to be much influenced by Scotch 
authority; for of the past and present state of the whole 
Erse nation, the Lowlanders are at least as ignorant as 
ourselves. To be ignorant is painful ; but it is danger- 
ous to quiet our uneasiness by the delusive opiate of 
hasty persuasion. 

208 But this is the age in which those who could not 
read, have been supposed to write ; in which the giants 
of antiquated romance have been exhibited as realities. 
If we know little of the ancient Highlanders, let us not 
fill the vacuity with Ossian. If we have not searched 
the Magellanic regions, 77 let us however forbear to 
people them with Patagons. 78 

209 Having waited some days at Armidel, we were 
flattered at last with a wind that promised to convey 
us to Mull. We went on board a boat that was taking 
in kelp, and left the isle of Skye behind us. We were 
doomed to experience, like others, the danger of trust- 
ing to the wind, which blew against us, in a short 
time, with such violence, that we, being no seasoned 
sailors, were willing to call it a tempest I was sea- 
sick, and lay down. Mr. Boswell kept the deck. The 

77 Regions near the strait of Magellan. 
7J Patagonians. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 143 

master knew not well whither to go ; and our difficulties 
might perhaps have filled a very pathetic page, had not 
Mr. Maclean of Col, who, with every other qualification 
which insular life requires, is a very active and skillful 
mariner, piloted us safe into his own harbor. 

COL. 

210 In the morning we found ourselves under the isle of 
Col, where we landed, and passed the first day and night 
with Captain Maclean, a gentleman who has lived some 
time in the East Indies, but having dethroned no Nabob, 79 
is not too rich to settle in his own country. 

211 Next day the wind was fair, and we might have had 
an easy passage to Mull ; but having, contrarily to our 
own intention, landed upon a new island, we would not 
leave it wholly unexamined. We therefore suffered the 
vessel to depart without us, and trusted the skies for 
another wind. 

212 Mr. Maclean of Col, having a very numerous family, 
has, for some time past, resided at Aberdeen, that he 
may superintend their education, and leaves the young 
gentleman, our friend, to govern his dominions, with the 
full power of a Highland chief. By the absence of the 
laird's family, our entertainment was made more difficult, 
because the house was in a great degree disfurnished ; 
but young Col's kindness and activity supplied all defects, 
and procured us more than sufficient accommodation. 

213 Here I first mounted a little Highland steed; and if 
there had been many spectators, should have been some- 
what ashamed of my ficure in the march. The horses of 



79 Not like Give or Hastings. 



t 4 4 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

the islands, as of other barren countries, are very low: 
they are indeed musculous and strong, beyond what their 
size gives reason for expecting; but a bulky man upon 
one of their backs makes a very disproportionate appear- 
ance. 

214 From the habitation of Captain Maclean we went to 
Grissipol, but called by the way on Mr. Hector Maclean, 
the minister of Col, whom we found in a hut, that is, a 
house of only one floor, but with windows and chimney, 
and not inelegantly furnished. Mr. Maclean has the 
reputation of great learning: he is seventy-seven years 
old, but not infirm, with a look of venerable dignity 
excelling what I remember in any other man. 

215 His conversation was not unsuitable to his appear- 
ance. I lost some of his good will, by treating a heretical 
writer with more regard than, in his opinion, a heretic 
could deserve. I honored his orthodoxy, and did not 
much censure his asperity. A man who has settled his 
opinions, does not love to have the tranquillity of his 
conviction disturbed ; and at seventy-seven it is time to 
be in earnest. 

216 Mention was made of the Erse translation of the 
New Testament, which has been lately published, and of 
which the learned Mr. Macqueen of Skye spoke with 
commendation ; but Mr. Maclean said, he did not use it, 
because he could make the text more intelligible to his 
auditors by an extemporary version. From this I in- 
ferred, that the language of the translation was not the 
language of the isle of Col. 

217 He has no public edifice for the exercise of his 
ministry, and can officiate to no greater number than a 
room can contain, and the room of a hut is not very 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 145 

large. This is all the opportunity of worship that is 
now granted to the inhabitants of the island, some of 
whom must travel thither perhaps ten miles. Two 
chapels were erected by their ancestors, of which I saw 
the skeletons, which now stand faithful witnesses of the 
triumph of Reformation. 80 

218 The want of churches is not the only impediment to 
piety: there is likewise a want of ministers. A parish 
often contains more islands than one ; and each island 
can have a minister only in its own turn. At Raasay, 
they had, I think, a right to service only every third 
Sunday. All the provision made by the present ecclesi- 
astical constitution, for the inhabitants of about a hun- 
dred square miles, is a prayer and sermon in a little 
room, once in three weeks ; and even this parsimonious 
distribution is at the mercy of the weather : and in those 
islands where the minister does not reside, it is impossible 
to tell how many weeks or months may pass without any 
public exercise of religion. 

GRISSIPOL IN COL. 

219 After a short conversation with Mr. Maclean, we 
went on to Grissipol, a house and farm tenanted by Mr. 
Macsweyn, where I saw more of the ancient life of a 
Highlander than I had yet found. Mrs. Macsweyn could 
speak no English, and had never seen any other places 
than the islands of Skye, Mull, and Col ; but she was 
hospitable and good-humored, and spread her table with 
sufficient liberality. We found tea here, as in every 
other place, but our spoons were of horn. 



Wide-open irony. 
IO 



146 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

220 The house of Grissipol stands by a brook very clear 
and quick, which is, I suppose, one of the most copious 
streams in the island. This place was the scene of an 
action, much celebrated in the traditional history of Col, 
but which probably no two relaters will tell alike. 

221 Some time, in the obscure ages, Macneil of Barra 
married the lady Maclean, who had the isle of Col for 
her jointure. Whether Macneil detained Col, when the 
widow was dead, or whether she lived so long as to make 
her heirs impatient, is perhaps not now known. The 
younger son, called John Gerves, or John the Giant, a 
man of great strength, who was then in Ireland, either 
for safety or for education, dreamed of recovering his 
inheritance ; and getting some adventurers together, 
which in those unsettled times was not hard to do, 
invaded Col. He was driven away, but was not dis- 
couraged, and, collecting new followers, in three years 
came again with fifty men. In his way he stopped at 
Artorinish in Morven, where his uncle was prisoner to 
Macleod, and was then with his enemies in a tent. Mac- 
lean took with him only one servant, whom he ordered to 
stay at the outside, and where he should see the tent 
pressed outward, to strike with his dirk, it being the 
intention of Maclean, as any man provoked him, to lay 
hands upon him and push him back. He entered the 
tent alone, with his Lochaber axe in his hand, and struck 
such terror into the whole assembly that they dismissed 
his uncle. 

222 When he landed at Col, he saw the sentinel, who 
kept watch toward the sea, running off to Grissipol, to 
give Macneil, who was there with a hundred and twenty 
men, an account of the invasion. He told to Macgill, one 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 147 

of his followers, that if he intercepted that dangerous 
intelligence, by catching the courier, he would give him 
certain lands in Mull. Upon this promise, Macgill pur- 
sued the messenger, and either killed or stopped him ; 
and his posterity, till very lately, held the lands in Mull. 

223 The alarm being thus prevented, he came unexpect- 
edly upon Macneil. Chiefs were in those days never 
wholly unprovided for an enemy. A fight ensued, in 
which one of the followers is said to have given an 
extraordinary proof of activity, by bounding backward 
over the brook of Grissipol. Macneil being killed, and 
many of his clan destroyed, Maclean took possession of 
the island, which the Macneils attempted to conquer by 
another invasion, but were defeated and repulsed. 

CASTLE OF COL. 

224 From Grissipol Mr. Maclean conducted us to his 
father's seat ; a neat new house erected near the old 
castle, I think by the last proprietor. Here we were 
allowed to take our station, and lived very commodiously, 
while we waited for moderate weather and a fair wind, 
which we did not so soon obtain ; but we had time to get 
some information of the present state of Col, partly by 
inquiry and partly by occasional excursions. 

225 Col is computed to be thirteen miles in length and 
three in breadth. Both the ends are the property of the 
Duke of Argyle, but the middle belongs to Maclean, 
who is called Col, as the only laird. 

226 Col is not properly rocky ; it is rather one continued 
rock, of a surface much diversified with protuberances," 
and covered with a thin layer of earth, which is often 
broken, and discovers the stone. Such a soil is not for 



i 4 8 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

plants that strike deep roots; and perhaps in the whole 
island nothing has ever yet grown to the height of a table. 
The uncultivated parts are clothed with heath, among 
which industry has interspersed spots of grass and 
corns; but no attempt has been made to raise a tree. 
Young Col, who has a very laudable desire of improving 
his patrimony, purposes some time to plant an orchard; 
which, if it be sheltered by a wall, may perhaps succeed. 
He has introduced the culture of turnips, of which he has 
a field, where the whole work was performed by his own 
hand. His intention is to provide food for his cattle in 
the winter. This innovation was considered by Mr. 
Macsweyn as the idle project of a young head, heated 
with English fancies ; but he has now found that turnips 
will ^eally grow, and that hungry sheep and cows will 
really eat them. 

227 The harvest in Col and in Lewis is ripe sooner than 
in Skye, and the winter in Col is never cold, but very 
tempestuous. I know not that I ever heard the wind so 
loud in any other place ; and Mr. Boswell observed that 
its noise was all its own, for there were no trees to 
increase it. 

228 Noise is not the worst effect of the tempests : for they 
have thrown sand from the shore over a considerable 
part of the land, and is said still to encroach and destroy 
more and more pasture ; but I am not of opinion that by 
any surveys or landmarks its limits have been ever fixed 
or its progression ascertained. 

229 We were at Col under the protection of the young 
laird. Wherever we roved, we were pleased to see the 
reverence with which his subjects regarded him. He 
did not endeavor to dazzle them by any magnificence of 
dress; his only distinction was a feather in his bonnet; 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 149 

but as soon as he appeared, they forsook their work and 
clustered about him : he took them by the hand, and they 
seemed mutually delighted. He has the proper dis- 
position of a chieftain, and seems desirous to continue 
the customs of his house. The bagpiper played regularly, 
when dinner was served, whose person and dress made a 
good appearance : and he brought no disgrace upon the 
family of Rankin, which has long supplied the lairds of 
Col with hereditary music. 

230 The tacksmen of Col seem to live with less dignity 
and convenience than those of Skye, where they had good 
houses, and tables not only plentiful, but delicate. In 
Col only two houses pay the window tax : for only two 
have six windows, which I suppose, are the laird's and 
Mr. Macsweyn's. 

231 The rents have, till within seven years, been paid in 
kind ; but the tenants, finding that cattle and corn varied 
in their price, desired for the future to give their landlord 
money ; which, not having yet arrived at the philosophy 
of commerce, they consider as being every year of the 
same value. 

232 There are tenants below the rank of tacksmen, that 
have got smaller tenants under them ; for in every place, 
where money is not the general equivalent, there must be 
some whose labor is immediately paid by daily food. 

233 A country that has no money is by no means con- 
venient for beggars, both because such countries are 
commonly poor, and because charity requires some 
trouble and some thought. A penny is easily given upon 
the first impulse of compassion, or impatience of impor- 
tunity ; but few will deliberately search their cupboards 
or their granaries to find out something to give. 

234 Yet beggars there sometimes are, who wander from 



iSo A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

island to island. We had, in our passage to Mull, the 
company of a woman and her child, who had exhausted 
the charity of Col. The arrival of a beggar on an island 
is accounted a sinistrous event. Everybody considers 
that he shall have the less for what he gives away. 
Their alms, I believe, is generally oatmeal. 

235 Near to Col is another island called Tirey, eminent 
for its fertility. Though it has but half the extent of 
Rum, it is so well peopled, that there have appeared not 
long ago, nine hundred and fourteen at a funeral. The 
plenty of this island enticed beggars to it, who seemed 
so burthensome to the inhabitants, that a formal compact 
was drawn up, by which they obliged themselves to grant 
no more relief to casual wanderers, because they had 
among them an indigent woman of high birth, whom 
they considered as entitled to all that they could spare. 
I have read the stipulation, which was indited with 
juridical formality, but was never made valid by regular 
subscription. 

236 If the inhabitants of Col have nothing to give, it is 
not that they are oppressed by their landlord ; their 
leases seem to be very profitable. One farmer, who pays 
only seven pounds a year, has maintained seven daughters 
and three sons, of whom the eldest is educated at Aber- 
deen for the ministry; and now at every vacation opens 
a school in Col. 

237 Life is here, in some respects, improved beyond the 
condition of some other islands. In Skye, what is 
wanted can only be bought, as the arrival of some wan- 
dering peddler may afford an opportunity; but in Col 
there is a standing shop, and in Mull there are two. A 
shop in the islands, as in other places of little frequen- 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 151 

tation, is a repository of everything requisite for com- 
mon use. Mr. Boswell's journal bl was filled, and he 
bought some paper in Col. To a man that ranges the 
streets of London, where he is tempted to contrive wants 
for the pleasure of supplying them, a shop affords no 
image worthy of attention ; but in an island, it turns 
the balance of existence between good and evil. To live 
in perpetual want of little things is a state not indeed of 
torture, but of constant vexation. I have in Skye had 
some difficulty to find ink for a letter'; and if a woman 
breaks her needle, the work is at a stop. 

238 As it is, the islanders are obliged to content them- 
selves with succedaneous means for many common pur- 
poses. I have seen the chief man of a very wide district 
riding with a halter for a bridle, and governing his 
hobby with a wooden curb. 

239 The people of Col, however, do not want dexterity 
to supply some of their necessities. Several arts which 
make trades, and demand apprenticeships in great cities, 
are here the practices of daily economy. In every house 
candles are made, both molded and dipped. Their wicks 
are small shreds of linen cloth. They all know how to 
extract from the cuddy oil for their lamps. They all tan 
skins, and make brogues. 

240 As we traveled through Skye, we saw many cot- 
tages, but they very frequently stood single on the naked 
ground. In Col, where the hills opened a place con- 
venient for habitation, we found a pretty village, of 
which every hut had a little garden adjoining. There 
is not in the Western Islands any collection of buildings 



sl Used in Boswell's Johnson. 



152 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

that can make pretensions to be called a town, except in 
the isle of Lewis, 82 which I have not seen. 

241 If Lewis is distinguished by a town, Col has also 
something peculiar. The young laird has attempted 
what no islander, perhaps, ever thought on. He had 
begun a road capable of a wheel carriage. He has 
carried it about a mile, and will continue it by annual 
elongation from his house to the harbor. 

242 Of taxes here is no reason for complaining ; they are 
paid by a very easy composition. .The malt tax for Col 
is twenty shillings. Whisky is very plentiful; there are 
several stills in the island, and more is made than the 
inhabitants consume. 

243 The inhabitants of Col have not yet learned to be 
weary of their heath and rocks, but attend their agricuh 
ture and their dairies, without listening to American 
seducements. 

244 There are some, however, who think that this emi- 
gration has raised terror disproportionate to its real evil ; 
and that it is only a new mode of doing what was always 
done. The Highlands, they say, never maintained their 
natural inhabitants ; but the people, when they found 
themselves too numerous, instead of extending cultiva- 
tion, provided for themselves by a more compendious 
method, and sought better fortune in other countries. 
They did not, indeed, go away in collective bodies, but 
withdrew invisibly, a few at a time; but the whole num- 
ber of fugitives was not less, and the difference between 
other times and this, is only the same as between evapo- 
ration and effusion. 



82 Lies northwest of Skye ; it is one of the scenes of Black's A 
Princess of Thule, 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 153 

245 This is plausible, but I am afraid it is not true. 
Those who went before, if they were not sensibly missed, 
as the argument supposes, must have gone either in less 
number, or in a manner less detrimental than at present ; 
because formerly there was no complaint. Those who 
then left the country were generally the idle dependents 
on over-burdened families, or men who had no property ; 
and therefore carried away only themselves. In the 
present eagerness of emigration, families and almost 
communities, go away together. Those who were con- 
sidered as prosperous and wealthy, sell their stock and 
carry away the money. Once none went away but the 
useless and poor ; in some parts there is now reason to 
fear that none will stay but those who are too poor to 
remove themselves, and too useless to be removed at the 
cost of others. 

246 Mr. Maclean informed us of an old game, of which 
he did not tell the original, but which may perhaps be 
used in other places, where the reason of it is not yet 
forgot. At New Year's eve, in the hall or castle of the 
laird, where, at festal seasons, there may be supposed a 
very numerous company, one man dresses himself in a 
cow's hide, upon which other men beat with sticks. He 
runs with all this noise round the house, which all the 
company quits in a counterfeited fright : the door is then 
shut. At New Year's eve there is no great pleasure to be 
had out of doors in the Hebrides. They are sure soon to 
recover from their terror enough to solicit for re-admis- 
sion : which, for the honor of poetry, is not to be obtained 
but by repeating a verse, with which those that are know- 
ing and provident take care to be furnished. 

247 Very near the house of Maclean stands the castle of 



154 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

Col, which was the mansion of the laird, till the house 
was built. It is built upon a rock, as Mr. Boswell re- 
marked, that it might not be mined. It is very strong, 
and having been not long uninhabited, is yet in repair. 
On the wall was, not long ago, a stone with an inscrip- 
tion, importing, " That if any man of the clan of Mac- 
lonich shall appear before this castle, though he come at 
midnight, with a man's head in his hand, he shall there 
find safety and protection against all but the king." 

248 After having listened for some days to the tempest 
and wandered about the island till our curiosity was 
satisfied, we began to think about our departure. To 
leave Col in October was not very easy. We, however, 
found a sloop which lay on the coast to carry kelp ; and 
for a price, which we thought levied upon our neces- 
sities, the master agreed to carry us to Mull, whence we 
might readily pass back to Scotland. 

MULL. 

249 As we were to catch the first favorable breath," we 
spent the night not very elegantly nor pleasantly in the 
vessel, and were landed next day at Tabor Morar, a port 
in Mull, which appears to an unexperienced eye formed 
for the security of ships ; for the mouth is closed by a 
small island, which admits them through narrow chan- 
nels into a basin sufficiently capacious. They are indeed 
safe from the sea, but there is a hollow between the 
mountains through which the wind issues from the land 
with very mischievous violence. 

250 There was no danger while we were there, and we 
found several other vessels at anchor, so that the port 
had a very commercial appearance. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 



iS5 



251 The young laird of Col, who had determined not to 
let us lose his company while there was any difficulty re- 
maining, came over with us. His influence soon ap- 
peared, for he procured us horses, and conducted us to 
the house of Doctor Maclean, where we found very kind 
entertainment and very pleasing conversation. Miss 
Maclean, who was born and had been bred at Glasgow, 
having removed with her father to Mull, added to other 
qualifications a great knowledge of the Erse language, 
which she had not learned in her childhood, but gained 
by study, and was the only interpreter of Erse poetry 
that I could ever find. 

252 The isle of Mull is perhaps in extent the third of the 
Hebrides. It is not broken by waters nor shot into 
promontories, but is a solid and compact mass, of breadth 
nearly equal to its length. Of the dimensions of the 
larger islands there is no knowledge approaching to ex- 
actness. I am willing to estimate it as containing about 
three hundred square miles. 

253 It is natural, in traversing this gloom of desolation, 
to inquire whether something may not be done to give 
nature a more cheerful face, and whether those hills and 
moors that afford heath, cannot with a little care and 
labor, bear something better? The first thought that 
occurs is to cover them with trees, for that in many of 
these naked regions trees will grow is evident, because 
stumps and roots are yet remaining; and the speculatist 
hastily proceeds to censure that negligence and laziness 
that has omitted for so long a time so easy an improve- 
ment. 

254 To drop seeds into the ground and attend their 
growth, requires little labor and no skill. He who re- 



156 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

members that all the woods, by which the wants of man 
have been supplied from the Deluge till now were self- 
grown, will not easily be persuaded to think all the art 
and preparation necessary which the georgic 83 writers 
prescribe to planters. Trees certainly have covered the 
earth with very little culture. They wave their tops 
among the rocks of Norway, and might thrive as well in 
the Highlands and Hebrides. 

255 But there is a frightful interval between the seed and 
timber. He that calculates the growth of trees has the 
unwelcome remembrance of the shortness of life driven 
hard upon him. He knows that he is doing what will 
never benefit himself; and when he rejoices to see the 
stem rise, is disposed to repine that another shall cut it 
down. 

256 Having not any experience of a journey in Mull, we 
had no doubt of reaching the sea by daylight, and there- 
fore had not left Dr. Maclean's very early. We traveled 
diligently enough, but found the country, for road there 
was none, very difficult to pass. We were always strug- 
gling with some obstruction or other, and our vexation 
was not balanced by any gratification of the eye or mind. 
We were now long enough acquainted with hills and 
heath to have lost the emotion that they once raised 
whether pleasing or painful, and had our mind employed 
only on our own fatigue. We were, however, sure, under 
Col's protection, of escaping all real evils. 

ULVA. 

257 While we stood deliberating we were happily 84 es- 



S3 relating to farming. Virgil called his poems an agriculture 
Georgics." s4 fortunately. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 157 

pied from an Irish ship that lay at anchor in the strait. 
The master saw that we wanted a passage, and with great 
civility sent us his boat, which quickly conveyed us to 
Ulva, where we were very liberally entertained by Mr. 
Macquarry. 

258 To Ulva we came in the dark, and left it before noon 
the next day. A very exact description, therefore, will 
not be expected. 

2 59 When the islanders were reproached with their ig- 
norance, or insensibility of the wonders of Staffa, 85 they 
had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it 
little, because they had always seen it ; and none but phi- 
losophers, nor they always, are struck with wonder other- 
wise than by novelty. How would it surprise an unen- 
lightened plowman to hear a company of sober men 
inquiring by what power the hand tosses a stone, or why 
the stone, when it is tossed, falls to the ground ! 

INCH KENNETH. 

260 In the morning we went again into the boat, and 
were landed on Inch Kenneth, an island about a mile 
long and perhaps half-a-mile broad, remarkable for 
pleasantness and fertility. It is verdant and grassy, and 
fit both for pasture and tillage; but it has no trees. Its 
only inhabitants were Sir Allan Maclean and two young 
ladies, his daughters, with their servants. 

261 Sir Allan is the chieftain of the great clan of Mac- 
lean, which is said to claim the second place among the 
Highland families, yielding only to Macdonald. When 



85 An adjacent small island of most interesting geological forma- 
tion. Among its wonders is Fingal's Cave. 



158 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

soldiers were lately wanting for the American war, 
application was made to Sir Allan, and he nominated 
a hundred men for the service, who obeyed the summons, 
and bore arms under his command. 

He had then, for some time, resided with the young 
ladies in Inch Kenneth, where he lives not only with 
plenty, but with elegance, having conveyed to his cottage 
a collection of books, and what else is necessary to make 
his hours pleasant. 

262 When we landed, we all walked together to the man- 
sion, where we found one cottage for Sir Allan, and I 
think two more for the domestics and the offices. We en- 
tered, and wanted little that palaces afford. Our room was 
neatly floored and well lighted ; and our dinner, which 
was dressed in one of the other huts, was plentiful and 
delicate. 

263 In the afternoon Sir Allan reminded us that the day 
was Sunday, which he never suffered to pass without 
some religious distinction, and invited us to partake in 
his acts of domestic worship ; which I hope neither Mr. 
Boswell nor myself will be suspected of a disposition to 
refuse. The elder of the ladies read the English Service. 

264 Inch Kenneth was once a seminary of ecclesiastics, 
subordinate, I suppose, to Icolmkill. Sir Allan had a 
mind to trace the foundation of the college, but neither I 
nor Mr. Boswell, who bends a keener eye-on vacancy, 
were able to perceive them. 

265 We told Sif Allan our desire of visiting Icolmkill, and 
entreated him to give us his protection and his company. 
He thought proper to hesitate a little; but the ladies 
hinted, that as they knew he would not finally refuse, he 
would do better if he preserved the grace of ready com- 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 159 

pliance. He took their advice, and promised to carry us 
on the morrow in his boat. 

We passed the remaining part of the day in such 
amusements as were in our power. Sir Allan related the 
American campaign, and at evening one of the ladies 
played on her harpsichord, while Col and Mr. Boswell 
danced a Scottish reel with the other. 

We could have been easily persuaded to a' longer stay 
upon Inch Kenneth, but life will not be all passed in 
delight. The session at Edinburgh was approaching, 
from which Mr. Boswell could not be absent. 

266 In the morning our boat was ready : it was high and 
strong. Sir Allan victualed it for the day, and provided 
able rowers. We now parted from the young laird of 
Col, who had treated us with so much kindness, and con- 
cluded his favors by consigning us to Sir Allan. Here 
we had the last embrace of this amiable man, who, while 
these pages were preparing to attest his virtues, perished 
in the passage between Ulva and Inch Kenneth. 

267 At last we came to — 

ICOLMKILL, OR IONA, 

but found no convenience for landing. Our boat could 
not be forced very near the dry ground, and our High- 
landers carried us over the water. 

268 We were now treading that illustrious island 
which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, 
whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the 
benefits of knowledge and the blessings of religion. To 
abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impos- 
sible if it were endeavored, and would be foolish if it 
were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power 



160 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

of our senses ; whatever makes the past, the distant, or 
the future predominate over the present, advances us in 
the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from 
my friends be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us 
indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been 
dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is 
little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force 
upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not 
grow warmer among the ruins of Iona. 86 

269 Besides the two principal churches, there are, I 
think, five chapels yet standing, and three more remem- 
bered. There are also crosses, of which two bear the 
names of St. John and St. Matthew. 

A large space of ground about these consecrated edi- 
fices is covered with grave-stones, few of which have any 
inscription. He that surveys it, attended by an insular 
antiquary, may be told where the kings of many nations 
are buried, and if he loves to soothe his imagination with 
the thoughts that naturally arise in places where the 
great and the powerful lie mingled with the dust, let him 
listen in submissive silence ; for if he asks any questions, 
his delight is at an end. 

270 Iona has long enjoyed, without any very credible 
attestation, the honor of being reputed the cemetery of 
the Scottish kings. S7 It is not unlikely that, when the 
opinion of local sanctity was prevalent, the chieftains of 

86 " Aye, call it holy ground ! " — Mrs. Hemans. There is a church 
in Ohio that is named after one of the ecclesiastics of Iona, St. 
Columba. 

87 Ross. — "Where is Duncan's body?" 

Macduff. — "Carried to Colme-kill (Iona) 
The sacred storehouse of his predecessors, 
And guardian of their bones." 

— Macbeth, Act II, Scene 2. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 161 

the isles, and perhaps some of the Norwegian or Irish 
princes, were reposited in this venerable inclosure. But 
by whom the subterraneous vaults are peopled is now 
utterly unknown. The graves are very numerous, and 
some of them undoubtedly contain the remains of men 
who did not expect to be so soon forgotten. 

271 There remains a broken building, which is called the 
Bishop's House, I know not by what authority. It was 
once the residence of some man above the common rank, 
for it has two stories and a chimney. We were shown a 
chimney at the other end, which was only a niche, with- 
out perforation, but so much does antiquarian credulity ° 
or patriotic vanity prevail, that it was not much more 
safe to trust the eye of our instructor than the memory. 

272 There is in the island one house more, and only one, 
that has a chimney ; we entered it, and found it neither 
wanting repair nor inhabitants ; but to the farmers, who 
now possess it, the chimney is of no great value ; for 
their fire was made on the floor, in the middle of the 
room, and notwithstanding the dignity of their mansion, 
they rejoiced, like their neighbors, in the comforts of 
smoke. 

273 We now left those illustrious ruins, by which Mr. 
Boswell was much affected, nor would I willingly be 
thought to have looked upon them without some emotion. 
Perhaps, in the revolutions of the world, Iona may be 
sometime again the instructress of the western regions. 

274 It was no long voyage to Mull, where, under Sir 
Allan's protection, we landed in the evening, and were 
entertained for the night by Mr. Maclean, a minister that 
lives upon the coast, whose elegance of conversation, and 
strength of judgment, would make him conspicuous in 



1 62 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

places of greater celebrity. Next day we dined with Dr. 
Maclean, another physician, and then traveled on to the 
house of a very powerful laird, Maclean of Lochbuy; 
for in this country every man's name is Maclean. 

275 Where races are thus numerous, and thus combined, 
none but the chief of a clan is addressed by his name. 
The distinction of the meaner people is made by their 
Christian names. In consequence of this practice, the 
late laird of Macfarlane, an eminent genealogist, consid- 
ered himself as disrespectfully treated if the common 
addition was applied to him. Mr. Macfarlane, said he, 
may with equal propriety be said to many ; but I, and 
I only, am Macfarlane. 

276 Lochbuy has, like the other insular chieftains, 
quitted the castle that sheltered his ancestors, and lives 
near it, in a mansion not very spacious or splendid. I 
have seen no houses in the islands much to be envied for 
convenience or magnificence, yet they bear testimony to 
the progress of arts and civility, as they show that rapine 
and surprise are no longer dreaded, and are much more 
commodious than the ancient fortresses. 

277 We were now to leave the Hebrides, where we had 
spent some weeks with sufficient amusement, and where 
we had amplified our thoughts with new scenes of 
nature and new modes of life. More time would have 
given us a more distinct view, but it was necessary that 
Mr. Boswell should return before the Courts of Justice 
were opened. 

278 From Lochbuy we rode a very few miles to the side 
of Mull which faces Scotland, where, having taken leave 
of our kind protector, Sir Allan, we embarked in a boat 
in which the seat provided for our accommodation was a 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 163 

heap of rough brushwood ; and on the twenty-second of 
October reposed at a tolerable inn on the main land. 

279 On the next day we began our journey southwards. 
The weather was tempestuous. The night came on while 
we had yet a great part of the way to go, though not so 
dark but that we could discern the cataracts s8 which 
poured down the hills on one side, and fell into one 
general channel that ran with great violence on the other. 
The wind was loud, the rain was heavy, and the whis- 
tling of the blast, the fall of the shower, the rush of the 
cataracts, and the roar of the torrent, made a nobler 
chorus of the rough 8a music of nature than it had ever 
been my chance to hear before. 

280 At last we came to — 

INVERARAY, 

where we found an inn, not only commodious, but mag- 
nificent. 

281 The difficulties of peregrination were now at an end. 
Mr. Boswell had the honor of being known to the Duke 
of Argyle, by whom we were very kindly entertained at 
his splendid seat, and supplied with conveniences for 
surveying his spacious park and rising forests. 

282 After two days' stay at Inveraray we proceeded 
southward over Glencroe, a black and dreary region, now 
made easily passable by a military road which rises from 
either end of the glen by an acclivity not dangerously 
steep but sufficiently laborious. In the middle, at the 
top of the hill, is a seat with this inscription, — 



" The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep." 

— Wordsivorth. 
" Merciful wind, sing me a hoarse, rough song. ' — Byron. 



1 64 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

REST, AND BE THANKFUL. 

Stones were placed to mark the distances, which the in- 
habitants have taken away, resolved, they said, " to have 
no new miles." 

283 From Glencroe we passed through a pleasant country 
to the banks of — 

LOCH LOMOND, 

and were received at the house of Sir James Colquhoun, 
who is owner of almost all the thirty islands of the loch, 
which we went in a boat next morning to survey. The 
heaviness of the rain shortened our voyage, but we 
landed on one island planted with yew and stocked with 
deer, and on another containing perhaps not more than 
half an acre, remarkable for the ruins of an old castle, 
on which the osprey 90 builds her annual nest. Had Loch 
Lomond been in a happier climate, it would have been 
the boast of wealth and vanity to own one of the little 
spots which it incloses, and to have employed upon it all 
the arts of embellishment. But as it is, the islets, which 
court the gazer at a distance, disgust 91 him at his ap- 
proach, when he finds, instead of soft lawns and shady 
thickets, nothing more than uncultivated ruggedness. 

284 Where the loch discharges itself into a river called 
the Leven, we passed a night with Mr. Smollett, a rela- 
tion of Dr. Smollett, 92 to whose memory he has raised an 
obelisk on the bank near the house in which he was born. 
The civility and respect which we found at every place, 

90 fish-hawk. 

91 displease. 

92 An English physician, novelist, and historian, born in 1721, 
best known by his novels, Adventures of Roderick Random and Expe- 
dition of Humphrey Clinker. 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 165 

it is ungrateful to omit, and tedious to repeat. Here we 
were met by a postchaise, that conveyed us to — 

GLASGOW. 

285 From Glasgow we directed our course to Auchinleck, 
an estate devolved, through a long series of ancestors, to 
Mr. Boswell's father, the present possessor. In our way 
we found several places remarkable enough in themselves, 
but already described by those who viewed them at more 
leisure, or with much more skill; and stopped two days 
at Mr. Campbell's, a gentleman married to Mr. Boswell's 
sister. 

AUCHINLECK, 

286 which signifies a stony field, seems not now to have 
any particular claim to its denomination. It is a district 
generally level and sufficiently fertile, but, like all the 
western side of Scotland, incommoded by very frequent 
rain. It was, with the rest of the country, generally 
naked, till the present possessor, finding by the growth 
of some stately trees near his old castle that the ground 
was favorable enough to timber, adorned it very dili- 
gently with annual plantations. 

287 Lord Auchinleck, who is one of the judges of Scot- 
land, and therefore not wholly at leisure for domestic 
business or pleasure, has yet found time to make im- 
provements in his patrimony. He has built a house of 
hewn stone, very stately and durable, and has advanced 
the value of his lands with great enderness to his tenants. 

288 I was, however, less delighted with the elegance of 
the modern mansion than with the sullen dignity of the 
old castle. I clambered with Mr. Boswell anions: the 



1 66 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

ruins, which afford striking images of ancient life. It 
is, like other castles, built upon a point of rock, and was 
I believe anciently surrounded with a moat. There is 
another rock near it, to which the drawbridge, when it 
was let down, is said to have reached. 

289 At no great distance from the house runs a pleasing 
brook, by a red rock, out of which has been hewn a very 
agreeable and commodious summer-house, at less ex- 
pense, as Lord Auchinleck told me, than would have been 
required to build a room of the same dimensions. The 
rock seems to have no more dampness than any other 
wall. Such opportunities of variety it is judicious not to 
neglect. 

290 We now returned to Edinburgh, where I passed 
some days with men of learning, whose names want no 
advancement from my commemoration, or with women 
of elegance, which perhaps disclaims a pedant's praise. 

291 The conversation of the Scots grows every day less 
unpleasing to the English ; 93 their peculiarities wear fast 
away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century 
provincial and rustic, even to themselves. The great, 
the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the 
English phrase and the English pronunciation, and in 
splendid companies Scotch is not much heard, except 
now and then from an old lady. 

292 There is one subject of philosophical curiosity to be 
found in Edinburgh, which no other city has to show — a 
College of the Deaf and Dumb, who are taught to speak, 
to read, to write, and to practice arithmetic, by a gentle- 
man, whose name is Braidwood. The number which 



to the 



Did the Doctor inquire whether English grew less unpleasing 

Scots? 



DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON 167 

s 

attends him is, I think, about twelve, which he brings 
together into a little school, and instructs according to 
their several degrees of proficiency. 

293 I do not mean to mention the instruction of the deaf 
as new. Having been first practiced upon the son of a 
constable °* of Spain, it was afterward cultivated with 
much emulation in England, by Wallis and Holder, and 
was lately professed by Mr. Baker, who once flattered me 
with hopes of seeing his method published. How far 
any former teachers have succeeded, it is not easy to 
know; the improvement of Mr. Braidwood's pupils is 
wonderful. They not only speak, write, and understand 
what is written, but if he that speaks looks toward 
them, and modifies his organs by distinct and full ut- 
terance, they know so well what is spoken, that it is an 
expression scarcely figurative to say they hear with the 
eye. That any have attained to the power mentioned 
by Burnet, of feeling sounds, by laying a hand on the 
speaker's mouth, I know not ; but I have seen so much, 
that I can believe more ; a single word, or a short sen- 
tence, I think, may possibly be so distinguished. 

294 It will readily be supposed by those that consider 
this subject, that Mr. Braidwood's scholars spell accu- 
rately. Orthography is vitiated among such as learn first 
to speak, and then to write, by imperfect notions of the 
relation between letters and vocal utterance ; but to those 
students every character is of equal importance ; for let- 
ters are to them not symbols of names, but of things ; 
when they write they do not represent a sound, but 
delineate a form. 



w Count of the Stable, a very high officer in certain European 
countries in the Middle Ages. 



1 68 A JOURNEY TO THE HEBRIDES 

295 This school I visited, and found some of the scholars 
waiting for their master, whom they are said to receive 
at his entrance with smiling countenances and sparkling 
eyes, delighted with the hope of new ideas. One of the 
young ladies had her slate before her, on which I wrote 
a question consisting of three figures, to be multiplied 
by two figures. She looked upon it, and quivering her 
fingers in a manner which I thought very pretty, but of 
which I knew not whether it was art or play, multiplied 
the sum regularly in two lines, observing the decimal 
place ; but did not add the two lines together, probably 
disdaining so easy an operation. I pointed at the place 
where the sum total should stand, and she noted it with 
such expedition as seemed to show that she had it only 
to write. 

296 It was pleasing to see one of the most desperate of 
human calamities capable of so much help : whatever 
enlarges hope will exalt courage; after having seen the 
deaf taught arithmetic, who would be afraid to cultivate 
the Hebrides? 

297 Such are the things which this journey has given me 
an opportunity of seeing, and such are the reflections 
which that sight has raised. Having passed my time 
almost wholly in cities, I may have been surprised by 
modes of life and appearances of nature that are familiar 
to men of wider survey and more varied conversation. 
Novelty and ignorance must always be reciprocal, and I 
cannot but be conscious that my thoughts on national 
manners are the thoughts of one who has seen but little. 




'J 9 

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE. 
1772-1834. 

Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth are usually 
thought of as constituting the Lake School. The epithet 
was given them in a mood of mild derision, but it clung 
and became a title of honor. 

Coleridge wrote much, both prose and poetry. In 
the first it was mostly theology and criticism. He was 
one of those great teachers who taught the world the 
transcendent greatness of Shakespeare. He was the au- 
thor of several dramas, and the maker of at least one 
translation of superior merit, The Death of Wallenstein. 
Among his poems are three, that, of a certainty, were 
not born to die, — The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 
Kubla Khan, and Christabcl, — and there are others, dif- 
ferent in the subject and style, which rank high. Shelley 
pronounced the Ode to France the finest in the English 
language. Fears in Solitude is a fine supplement to the 
ode named. Coleridge looked upon the country across 
the Channel with the eyes of Burke, rather than of Fox. 
Dejection — an Ode, The Nightingale, Love, and The 
Picture are worthy poems. 



171 



Christabel 



PREFACE. 1 

The first part of the following poem was written in 
the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven, 
at Stowey, in the county of Somerset. The second part, 
after my return from Germany, in the year one thousand 
eight hundred, at Keswick, Cumberland. Since the lat- 
ter date, my poetic powers have been, till very lately, in 
a state of suspended animation. But as, in my very first 
conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my 
mind with the wholeness no less than with the loveliness 
of a vision, I trust that I shall yet be able to embody in 
verse the three parts yet to come. 2 

It is probable, that if the poem had been finished at 
either of the former periods, or if even the first and sec- 
ond part had been finished in the year 1800, the impres- 
sion of its originality would have been much greater than 
I dare at present expect. But for this, I have only my 
own indolence to blame. The dates are mentioned for the 
exclusive purpose of precluding charges of plagiarism or 
servile imitation from myself. For there is among us a 
set of critics who seem to hold that every possible thought 
and image is traditional ; who have no notion that there 
are such things as fountains in the world, small as well 
as great ; and who would, therefore, charitably derive 
every rill they behold flowing, from a perforation made in 
some other man's tank. I am confident, however, that as 

1 To the edition of 1816. 

2 Unfortunately not done. 

173 



174 CHRIST ABEL 

far as the present poem is concerned, the celebrated poets 
whose writings I might be suspected of having imitated, 
either in particular passages, or in the tone and the spirit 
of the whole, would be among the first to vindicate me 
from the charge, and who, on any striking coincidence, 
would permit me to address them in this doggerel version 
of two monkish Latin hexameters : — 

'Tis mine and it is likewise yours, 
But an if this will not do, 
Let it be mine, good friend ! for I 
Am the poorer of the two. 

I have only to add, that the meter of the Christabel 
is not, properly speaking, irregular, though it may seem 
so from its being founded on a new principle, namely, 
that of counting in each line the accents, not the syllables. 3 
Though the latter may vary from seven to twelve, yet in 
each line the accents will be found to be only four. 
Nevertheless, this occasional variation in number of syl- 
lables is not introduced wantonly, or for the mere ends of 
convenience, but in correspondence with some transition 
in the nature of the imagery or passion. 

PART THE FIRST. 

* 

'Tis the middle of the night by the castle clock, 
And the owls have awakened the crowing cock ! 

Tu — whit ! Tu — whoo ! 

And hark, again ! the crowing cock, 

How drowsily it crew. s 

Sir Leoline, the Baron rich, 

Hath a toothless mastiff, which 



3 Observe this in reading ; read aloud. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 175 

From her kennel beneath the rock 

Maketh answer to the clock, 4 

Four for the quarters, and twelve for the hour; I0 

Ever and aye, by shine and shower, 

Sixteen short howls, not over loud : 

Some say, she sees my lady's shroud. 

Is the night chilly and dark? 

The night is chilly, but not dark. 

The thin gray cloud is spread on high, 

It covers but not hides the sky. 

The moon is behind, and at the full ; 

And yet she looks both small and dull. 20 

The night is chill, the cloud is gray : 

'Tis a month before the month of May, 

And the spring comes slowly up this way. 

The lovely lady, Christabel, 

Whom her father loves so well, 2S 

What makes 5 her in the wood so late, 

A furlong from the castle gate? 

She had dreams all yesternight 

Of her own betrothed knight ; 

And she in the midnight wood will pray 3<> 

For the weal of her lover that's far away. 

She stole along, she nothing spoke, 

The sighs she heaved were soft and low, 

And naught was green upon the oak, 35 

But moss and rarest mistletoe : 

She kneels beneath the huge oak tree, 

And in silence prayeth she. 



a chiming clock, 
requires her to be. 



176 CHRIST ABEL 

The lady sprang up suddenly, 

The lovely lady, Christabel ! 40 

It moaned as near, as near can be, 

But what it is, she cannot tell. — 

On the other side it seems to be, 

Of the huge, broad-breasted, old oak tree. 

The night is chill ; the forest bare ; 4S 

Is it the wind that moaneth bleak? 

There is not wind enough in the air 

To move away the ringlet curl 

From the lovely lady's cheek — 

There is not wind enough to twirl s° 

The one red leaf, the last of its clan, 6 

That dances as often as dance it can, 

Hanging so light, and hanging so high, 

On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. 

Hush, beating heart of Christabel ! s5 

Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! « 

She folded her arms beneath her cloak, 
And stole to the other side of the oak. 
What sees she there? 

There she sees a damsel bright, 

Drest in a silken robe of white, 

That shadowy in the moonlight shone : 

The neck that made that white robe wan, 7 

Her stately neck, and arms were bare; 



6 " And if I should live to be 

The last leaf upon the tree 
In the spring." 

— Holmes. 

7 " Wan and of a leaden hue." — Chaucer. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 177; 

Her blue- veined feet unsandaled were; 65 

And wildly glittered here and there 
The gems entangled in her hair. 
I guess, 'twas frightful there to see — 
A lady so richly clad as she — 
Beautiful excedingly ! 7 ° 

Mary, mother, save me now! 
(Said Christabel), And who art thou? 
The lady strange made answer meet, 
And her voice was faint and sweet : — 
" Have pity on my sore distress, 
I scarce can speak for weariness." 
" Stretch forth thy hand, and have no fear," 
Said Christabel, " How earnest thou here?" 
And the lady, whose voice was faint' and sweet, 
Did thus pursue her answer meet : — £o 

" My sire is of a noble line, 
And my name is Geraldine : 
Five warriors seized me yestermorn, 
Me, even me, a maid forlorn : 
They choked my cries with force and fright, 8 s 
And tied me on a palfrey white. 
The palfrey was as fleet as wind, 
And they rode furiously behind, 
They spurred amain, their steeds were white ; 
And once we crossed the shade of night. 90 

As sure as Heaven shall rescue me, 
I have no thought what men they be; 
Nor do I know how long it is 
(For I have lain entranced I wis°) 
Since one, the tallest of the five, 95 

Took me from the palfrey's back, 
12 



178 CHRIST ABEL 

A weary woman, scarce alive. 

Some muttered words his comrades spoke : 

He placed me underneath this oak, 

He swore they would return with haste ; I0 ° 

Whither they went I cannot tell — 

I thought I heard, some minutes past, 

Sounds as of a castle bell, 

Stretch forth thy hand (thus ended she), 

And help a wretched maid to flee." 10 s 

Then Christabel stretched forth her hand 

And comforted fair Geraldine : 

" O well bright dame may you command 

The service of Sir Leoline ; 

And gladly our stout chivalry I10 

Will he send forth and friends withal 

To guide and guard you safe and free 

Home to your noble father's hall." 

She rose : and forth with steps they passed 

That strove to be, and were not, fast. Ij s 

Her gracious stars the lady blest, 

And thus spake on sweet Christabel ; 

" All our household are at re^t, 

The hall as silent as the cell. 

Sir Leoline is weak in health I2 ° 

And may not well awakened be, 

But we will move as if in stealth : 

And I beseech your courtesy 

This night, to share your couch with me." 8 

They crossed the moat, and Christabel I25 

Took the key that fitted well ; 



; Christabel speaks as if receiving a courtesy, not conferring one. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 179 

A little door she opened straight, 

All ° in the middle of the gate ; 

The gate that was ironed within and without, 

Where an army in battle-array had marched out ; I3 ° 

The lady sank, belike' through pain, 

And Christabel with might and main 

Lifted her up, a weary weight, 

Over the threshold of the gate : 

Then the lady rose again, J 3S 

And moved, as she were not in pain. 

So free from danger, free from fear, 

They crossed the court : right glad they were. 

And Christabel devoutly cried 

To the lady by her side, I4 ° 

" Praise we the Virgin all divine 

Who hath rescued thee from thy distress ! " 

" Alas, alas ! " said Geraldine, 

" I cannot speak for weariness." 

So free from danger, free from fear, X 4S 

They crossed the court : right glad they were. 

Outside her kennel, the mastiff old 

Lay fast asleep, in moonshine cold. 10 

The mastiff old did not awake, 

Yet she an angry moan did make ! IS ° 

And what can ail the mastiff bitch ? 

Never till now she uttered yell 

Beneath the eye of Christabel. 

Perhaps it is the owlet's scritch : 

For what can ail the mastiff bitch ? u *55 



9 exactly. 

10 " The cold, white moon." — Byron. 

11 A hint here of an evil presence; another in line 161. 



i8o CHRIST ABEL 

They passed the hall, that echoes still, 

Pass as lightly as you will! 

The brands were flat, the brands were dying, 

Amid their own white ashes lying ; 

But when the lady passed, there came l6 ° 

A tongue of light, a fit of flame ; 

And Christabel saw the lady's eye, 

And nothing else saw she thereby, 

Save the boss of the shield of Sir Leoline tall, 

Which hung in a murky old niche in the wall. l6s 

" O softly tread," said Christabel, 

" My father seldom sleepeth well." 

Sweet Christabel her feet doth bare, 

And jealous 12 of the listening air 

They steal their way from stair to stair, I 7° 

Now in glimmer, and now in gloom, 

And now they pass the Baron's room, 

As still as death, with stifled breath ! 

And now have reached her chamber dqor ; 

And now doth Geraldine press 13 down X 7S 

The rushes 14 of the chamber floor. 

The moon shines dim 15 in the open air 

And not a moonbeam enters here. 

But they without its light can see 

The chamber carved so curiously, l8 ° 

Carved with figures strange and sweet, 

All made out of the carver's brain, 

For a lady's chamber meet : 



12 afraid. 

13 tread " Our Tarquin then 

Did softly press the rushes." 

— Cymbeline, Act I, Scene 2. 

14 Instead of rug or carpet. 

15 There's a " thin gray cloud." 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 181 

The lamp with twofold silver chain 

Is fastened to an angel's feet. l8s 

The silver lamp bnrns dead and dim; 

But Christabel the lamp will trim. 

She trimmed the lamp, and made it bright, 

And left it swinging to and fro, 

While Geraldine in wretched plight, I9 ° 

Sank down upon the floor below. 

" O weary lady, Geraldine, 

I pray you, drink this cordial wine ! 

It is a wine of virtuous powers ; 

My mother made it of wild flowers." J 95 

" And will your mother pity me, 

Who am a maiden most forlorn? " 

Christabel answered — " Woe is me ! 

She died the hour that I was born. 

I have heard the gray-haired friar tell, 200 

How on her death-bed she did say, 

That she should hear the castle bell 

Strike twelve upon my wedding day. 

mother dear ! that thou wert here ! " 

" I would," said Geraldine, " she were." 2 °s 

But soon with altered voice, said she — 

" Off, wandering mother ! Peak and pine ! 16 

1 have power to bid thee flee." 
Alas ! what ails poor Geraldine ? 

Why stares she with unsettled eye? 2I0 



10 " Weary sev'n nights nine times nine 

Shall he dwindle, peak and pine." 
Geraldine fitly snatches a phrase from the " First Witch 
Macbeth. 



1 8 2, CHRIST ABEL 

Can she the bodiless dead espy? 

And why with hollow voice cries she, 

" Off, woman, off ! this hour is mine — 

Though thou her guardian spirit be, 

Off, woman, off! 'tis given to me." 2IS 

Then Christabel knelt by the lady's side, 

And raised to heaven her eyes so blue — 

" Alas ! " said she, " this ghastly ride — 

Dear lady ! it hath wildered you ! " 

The lady wiped her moist cold brow, Z20 

And faintly said, " 'Tis over now ! " 

Again the wild-flower wine she drank ! 

Her fair large eyes 'gan glitter bright, 

And from the floor whereon she sank, 

The lofty lady stood upright; 22 s 

She was most beautiful to see, 

Like a lady of a far countree. , 

And thus the lofty lady spake — 

" All they who live in the upper sky, 

Do love you, holy Christabel ! *3° 

And you love them, and for their sake 

And for the good which me befell, 

Even I in my degree will try, 17 

Fair maiden, to requite you well. 

But now unrobe yourself; for I *35 

Must pray, ere yet in bed I lie." 

Quoth Christabel, " So let it be ! " 
And as the lady bade, did she. 

17 False. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 183 

Her gentle limbs did she undress, 

And lay down in her loveliness. 2 *° 

But through her brain of weal and woe 

So many thoughts moved to and fro, 

That vain it were her lids to close ; 

So half-way from the bed she rose, 

And on her elbow did recline 2 *s 

To look at the lady Geraldine. 

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 

And slowly rolled her eyes around ; 

Then drawing in her breath aloud, 

Like one that shuddered, she unbound 25 ° 

The cincture from beneath her breast : 

Her silken robe, and inner vest, 

Dropt to her feet, and full in view, 

Behold ! her bosom and half her side — 

A sight to dream of, not to tell ! 18 *55 

O shield her ! shield sweet Christabel ! 

Yet Geraldine nor speaks nor stirs : 
Ah ! what a stricken look was hers ! 
Deep from within she seems half-way 
To lift some weight with sick assay, 19 * 6 ° 

And eyes the maid and seeks delay; 
Then suddenly, as one defied, 
Collects herself in scorn and pride, 
And lay down by the Maiden's side ! — 
And in her arms the maid she took, 26s 

Ah, wel-a-day ! 

18 Thanks ! 
10 faint effort. 



CHRISTABEL 

And with low voice and doleful look 
These words did say: 

" In the touch of this bosom there worketh a spell, 
Which is lord of thy utterance, Christabel! 2 ?° 
Thou knowest to-night, and wilt know to-morrow 
This mark of my shame, this seal of my sorrow ; 
But vainly thou warrest, 20 

For this is alone in 
Thy power to declare, a ?s 

That in the dim forest 
Thou heardest a low moaning, 
And found'st a bright lady, surpassingly fair: 
And didst bring her home with thee in love and in 

charity, 
To shield her and shelter her from the damp 28 ° 
air." 

THE CONCLUSION TO PART THE FIRST. 

It was a lovely sight to see 21 
The lady Christabel, when she 
Was praying at the old oak tree, 

Amid the jagged shadows 

Of mossy leafless boughs* 28 s 

Kneeling in the moonlight, 

To make her gentle vows ; 
Her slender palms together prest, 
Heaving sometimes on her breast; 
Her face resigned to bliss or bale — 2 9° 

Her face, oh call it fair, not pale, 
And both blue eyes more bright than clear, 
Each about to have a tear. 



' tryest. 
The poet takes us back to the beginning. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 185 

With open eyes 22 (ah woe is me!) 

Asleep, and dreaming fearfully, 2 95 

Fearfully dreaming, yet I wis, 

Dreaming that alone, which is — 

O sorrow and shame ! Can this be she, 

The lady who knelt at the old oak tree? 

And lo ! the worker of these harms, 300 

That holds the maiden in her arms, 

Seems to slumber still and mild, 

As a mother with her child. 

A star hath set, a star hath risen, 

O Geraldine ! since arms of thine 305 

Have been the lovely lady's prison. 

O Geraldine ! one hour was thine 

Thou'st had thy will ! By tairn and rill, 

The night-birds all that hour were still.- 3 

But now they are jubilant anew, 310 

From cliff and tower, tu — whoo ! tu — whoo ! 

Tu — whoo ! tu — whoo ! from wood and fell ! 

And see ! 24 the lady Christabel 

Gathers herself from out her trance ; 

Her limbs relax, her countenance 315 

Grows sad and soft ; the smooth thin lids 

Close o'er her eyes ; and tears she sheds — 

Large tears that leave the lashes bright ! 

And oft the while she seems to smile 320 

As infants at a sudden light ! 

Yea, she doth smile, and she doth weep, 

Like a youthful hermitess, 



22 Narrative continues. 

23 The spirit of evil was abroad. 

24 The " hour " has passed. 



186 CHRISTABEL 

Beauteous in a wilderness, 

Who, praying always, prays in sleep. ,25 

And, if she move unquietly, 

Perchance 'tis but the blood so free, 

Comes back and tingles in her feet. 

No doubt, she hath a vision sweet. 

What if her guardian spirit 'twere, 333 

What if she knew her mother near? 

But this she knows, in joys and woes, 

That saints will aid if men will call : 

For the blue sky bends over all ! 

PART THE SECOND. 

" Each matin bell," the Baron saith, 335 

" Knells us back to a world of death." 

These words Sir Leoline first said, 

When he rose and found his lady dead : 

These words Sir Leoline will say, 

Many a morn to his dying day. 34 ° 

And hence the custom and law began, 

That still at dawn the sacristan 25 

Who duly pulls the heavy bell, 

Five and forty beads must tell 

Between each stroke 2tJ — a warning knell, 345 

Which not a soul can choose but hear 

From Bratha Head to Wyndermere. 27 

Saith Bracy the bard, " So let it knell! 

And let the drowsy sacristan 

Still count as slowly as he can ! , 35° 



25 Sexton. 

26 " A palace and a prison on each hand." — Byron. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 187 

There is no lack of such, I ween 

As well fill up the space between. 

In Langdale Pike and Witch's Lair, 27 

And Dungeon-ghyll 2T so foully rent, 

With ropes of rock and bells of air 35S 

Three sinful sextons' ghosts are pent, 

Who all give back, one after t'other, 

The death-note to their living brother ; 

And oft too, by the knell offended, 

Just as their one ! two ! three ! is ended, 36 ° 

The devil mocks the doleful tale 

With a merry peal from Borrow-dale." 

The air is still ! through mist and cloud 

That merry peal comes ringing loud ; 

And Geraldine shakes off her dread, 3<55 

And rises lightly from the bed; 

Puts on her silken vestments white, 

And tricks 28 her hair in lovely plight, 

And nothing doubting of her spell, 

Awakens the lady Christabel. 37 ° 

" Sleep you, sweet lady Christabel ? 

I trust that you have rested well." 

And Christabel awoke and spied 

The same who lay down by her side — 

O rather say, the same whom she 375 

Raised up beneath the old oak tree ! 

Nay, fairer yet ! and yet more fair ! 

For she belike hath drunken deep 



27 The geography of this poem is not material. 

" 8 adorns, dresses. "And tricks his beams." — Lycidas, line 170. 



CHRISTABEL 

Of all the blessedness of sleep ! 

And while she spake, her looks, her air 380 

Such gentle thankfulness declare, 

That (so it seemed) her girded vests 

Grew tight beneath her heaving breasts. 

" Sure I have sinned ! " 29 said Christabel, 

" Now heaven be praised if all be well ! " 38s 

And in low faltering tones, yet sweet, 

Did she the lofty lady greet 

With such perplexity of mind 

As dreams too lively leave behind. 

So quickly she rose, and quickly arrayed 390 

Her maiden limbs, and having prayed 

That He who on the cross did groan 

Might wash away her sins unknown, 

She forthwith led fair Geraldine 

To meet her sire, Sir Leoline. 39S 

The lovely maid and the lady tall 

Are pacing both into the hall, 

And pacing on through page and groom, 

Enter the Baron's presence room. 

The Baron rose, and while he prest 4 °° 

His gentle daughter to his breast, 

With cheerful wonder in his eyes 

The lady Geraldine espies, 

And gave such welcome to the same, 

As might beseem so bright a dame! *° s 

But when he heard the lady's tale, 

And when she told her father's name, 

Self-reproach. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE j8 9 

Why waxed Sir Leoline so pale, 
Murmuring o'er the name again, 
Lord Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine? * 10 

Alas ! they had been friends in youth ; 30 

But whispering tongues can poison truth; 

And constancy lives in realms above; 

And life is thorny; and youth is vain; 

And to be wroth with one we love, 4I5 

Doth work like madness in the brain. 

And thus it chanced, as I divine, 

With Roland and Sir Leoline. 

Each spake words of high disdain 

And insult to his heart's best brother: 42 ° 

They parted — ne'er to meet again ! 

But never either found another 

To free the hollow heart from paining — 

They stood aloof, the scars remaining, 

Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; 42S 

A dreary sea now flows between, 

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, 

Shall wholly do away, I ween, 

The marks of that which once hath been. 

Sir Leoline, a moment s space, 43 ° 

Stood gazing on the damsel's face; 
And the youthful Lord of Tryermaine 
Came back upon his heart again. 

O then the Baron forgot his age, 

His noble heart swelled high with rage; 435 



30 The next twenty lines are a passage seldom surpassed in truth 
and beauty. 



190 CHRIST ABEL 

He swore by the wounds in Jesu's side, 

He would proclaim it far and wide 

With trump and solemn heraldry, 

That they, who thus had wronged the dame, 

Were base as spotted infamy ! 44 ° 

" And if they dare deny the same, 

My herald shall appoint a week, 

And let the recreant traitors seek 

My tourney court — that there and then 

I may dislodge their reptile souls 44s 

From the bodies of and forms of men ! " 

He spake : his eye in lightning rolls ! 

For the lady was ruthlessly seized ; 31 and he kenned 

In the beautiful lady the child of his friend ! 

And now the tears were on his face, 450 

And fondly in his arms he took 

Fair Geraldine, who met the embrace, 

Prolonging it with joyous look, 

Which when she viewed, a vision fell 

Upon the soul of Christabel, 45s 

The vision of fear, the touch and pain ! 

She shrunk and shuddered, and saw again 

(Ah, woe is me! Was it for thee, 

Thou gentle maid; such sights to see?) 

Again she saw that bosom old, 460 

Again she felt that bosom cold, 

And drew in her breath with a hissing sound : 

Whereat the Knight turned wildly round, 

And nothing saw, but his own sweet maid 

With eyes upraised, as one that prayed. 46s 



31 So he believed. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 191 

The touch, the sight, had passed away, 
And in its stead that vision blest, 
Which comforted her after-rest, 
While in the lady's arms she lay, 
Had put a rapture in her breast, 
And on her lips and o'er her eyes, 
Spread smiles like light ! 

With new surprise, 
" What ails then my beloved child ? " 
The Baron said — His daughter mild 
Made answer, " All will yet be well ! " 47s 

I ween she had no power to tell 
Aught else : so mighty was the spell. 
Yet he, 32 who saw this Geraldine, 
Had deemed her sure a thing divine, 
Such sorrow with such grace she blended, 48 ° 

As if she feared she had offended 
Sweet Christabel, that gentle maid ! 
And with such lowly tones she prayed, 
She might be sent without delay 
Home to her father's mansion. 48s 

" Nay ! 
Nay, by my soul!" said Leoline. 
" Ho ! Bracy the bard, the charge be thine ! 
Go thou, with music sweet and loud, 
And take two steeds with trappings proud, 
And take the youth whom thou lov'st best, 490 
To bear thy harp, and learn thy song, 
And clothe you both in solemn vest, 
And over the mountains haste along, 
Lest wandering folk, that are abroad, 
Detain vou on the valley road. 49S 



Any one who saw would have deemed. 



1 92 CHRIST ABEL 

And when he 33 hath crossed the Irthing flood, 

My merry bard ! he hastes, he hastes 

Up Knorren Moor, through Halegarth Wood, 

And reaches soon that castle good 

Which stands and threatens Scotland's wastes, soo 

" Bard Bracy ! bard Bracy ! your horses are fleet, 

You must ride up the hall, your music so sweet, 

More loud than your horses' echoing feet ! 

And loud and loud to Lord Roland call, 

Thy daughter is safe in Langdale hall ! s° s 

Thy beautiful daughter is safe and free — 

Sir Leoline greets thee thus through me. 

He bids thee come without delay, 

With all thy numerous array, 

And take thy lovely daughter home : sio 

And he will meet thee on the way 

With all his numerous array 

White with their panting palfreys' foam, 

And, by my honor ! I will say, 

That I repent me of the day, sis 

When I spake words of fierce disdain 

To Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine ! — 

For since that evil hour hath flown, 

Many a summer's sun have shone; 

Yet ne'er found I a friend again &° 

Like Roland de Vaux of Tryermaine." 

The lady fell, and clasped his knees, 
Her face upraised, her eyes o'erflowing ; 
And Bracy replied with faltering voice, 



33 Changes from second person to third ; he sees Bracy already 
far on his way. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 193 

His gracious hail on all bestowing : — 525 

" Thy words, thou sire of Christabel, 
Are sweeter than my harp can tell, 
Yet might I gain a boon of thee, 
This day my journey should not be ; 
So strange a dream hath come to me: 53 ° 

That I vowed with music loud 
To clear yon wood from thing unblest, 
Warned by a vision in my rest ! 
For in my sleep I saw that dove, 
That gentle bird whom thou dost love, 53S 

And call'st by thy own daughter's name — 
Sir Leoline ! I saw the same 
Fluttering, and uttering fearful moan, 
Among the green herbs in the forest alone. 
Which when I saw and when I heard, 54° 

I wondered what might ail the bird : 
For nothing near it could I see, 
Save the grass and green herbs underneath the 
old tree. 

"And in my dream, methought, I went 
To search out what might there be found: s *5 
And what the sweet bird's trouble meant, 
That thus lay fluttering on the ground. 
I went and peered, and could descry 
No cause for her distressful cry ; 
But yet for her dear lady's sake ss ° 

I stooped, methought, the dove to take, 
When lo ! I saw a bright green snake 
Coiled around its wings and neck. 
Green as the herbs on which it couched, 
13 



194 CHRISTAB&L 

Close by the dove its head it crouched ; sss 

And with the dove it heaves and stirs, 

Swelling its neck as she swelled hers ! 34 

I awoke ; it was the midnight hour, 

The clock was echoing in the tower; 

But though my slumber was gone by, s6 ° 

This dream it would not pass away — 

It seems to live upon my eye ! 35 

And thence I vowed this selfsame day, 

With music strong and saintly song 

To wander through the forest bare s6s 

Lest aught unholy loiter there." 

Thus Bracy said : the Baron, the while, 

Half-listening heard him with a smile; 

Then turned to Lady Geraldine, 

His eyes made up of wonder and love ; s? 

And said in courtly accents fine, 

" Sweet maid, Lord Roland's beauteous dove, 

With arms more strong than harp or song, 

Thy sire and I will crush the snake ! " 

He kissed her forehead as he spake, 575 

And Geraldine in maiden wise, 36 

Casting down her large bright eyes, 

With blushing cheek and courtesy fine 

She turned her from Sir Leoline; 

Softly gathering up her train, s8 ° 

That o'er her bright arm fell again ; 

And folded her arms across her chest, 

And couched her head upon her breast, 



As the snake was to the dove, so was Geraldine to Christabel. 

I see it always. 

fashion. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 195; 

And looked askance 37 at Christabel — 

Jesu, Maria, shield her well ! s8s 

A snake's small eye blinks dull and shy, 

And the lady's eyes they shrunk in her head, 

Each shrunk up to a serpent's eye, 

And with somewhat of malice, and more of dread 

At Christabel she looked askance ! — 59 ° 

One moment — and the sight was fled ! 

But Christabel in dizzy trance, 38 

Stumbling on the unsteady ground — 

Shuddered aloud with a hissing sound ; 

And Geraldine again turned round, S95 

And like a thing, that sought relief, 

Full of wonder and full of grief, 

She rolled her large bright eyes divine 

Wildly on Sir Leoline. 

The maid, alas ! her thoughts are gone, 6o ° 

She nothing sees — no sight but one ! 

The maid, devoid of guile and sin, 

I know 39 not now, in fearful wise 

So deeply had she drunken in 

That look, those shrunken serpent eyes, 6 ° 5 

That all her features were resigned 

To this sole image in her mind : 

And passively did imitate 

That look of dull and treacherous hate, 

And thus she stood, in dizzy trance, 40 6l ° 



37 That her father might not see. 
:s Effect of that horrid face-making. 
30 recognize. 
40 She wore that snaky face. 

13 



196 CHRIST ABEL 

Still picturing that look askance, 

With forced unconscious sympathy 

Full before her father's view — 

As far as such a look could be, 

In eyes so innocent and blue! 6l3 

And when the trance was o'er, the maid 

Paused awhile and inly 41 prayed, 

Then falling at her father's feet, 

" By my mother's soul do I entreat, 

That thou, this woman send away ! " 62 ° 

She said, and more she could not say, 

For what she knew she could not tell, 

O'er-mastered by the mighty spell. 

Why is thy cheek so wan and wild, 

Sir Leoline? Thy only child 62S 

Lies at thy feet, thy joy, thy pride, 

So fair, so innocent, so mild; 

The same, for whom thy lady died! 

O by the pangs of her dead mother 

Think thou no evil of thy child ! 63 ° 

For her, and thee, and for no other, 

She prayed the moment ere she died : 

Prayed that the babe for whom she died, 

Might prove her dear lord's joy and pride! 

That prayer her deadly pangs beguiled, 63S 

42 Sir Leoline ! 

And would'st thou wrong thy only child, 

42 Her child and thine? 



41 " And over all a blacke stole (robe) shee did throw, 
As one that inly mourned. " 

— The Faerie Queene, Canto I, Stanza 4. 
42 Accent every syllable. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE J 97 

Within the Baron's heart and brain 

If thoughts like these had any share, 6 *° 

They only swelled his rage and pain, 

And did but work confusion there. 

His heart was cleft with pain and rage, 

His cheeks they quivered, his eyes were wild, 

Dishonored thus in his old age; 6 45 

Dishonored by his only child, 

And all his hospitality 

To th' insulted daughter of his friend, 

By more than woman's jealousy, 

Brought thus to a disgraceful end — 6 s° 

He rolled his eye with stern regard 

Upon the gentle minstrel bard, 

And said in tones abrupt, austere — 

Why, Bracy ! dost thou loiter here ? 

I bade thee hence ! the bard obeyed ; 6 ss 

And turning from his own sweet maid, 

The aged knight, Sir Leoline, 

Led forth the lady Geraldine! 

THE CONCLUSION 43 TO PART THE SECOND. 

A little child, a limber elf, 

Singing, dancing to itself, 66 ° 

A fairy thing with red round cheeks 

That always finds and never seeks, 



" This conclusion first appeared in a letter to Southey. It was 
placed by the author as a conclusion to " Part the Second " in the 
edition of 1816. The editor of Coleridge's letters fails to see any 
relation between the conclusion and the poem. No harm can come 
from trying to find one. 



198 CHRIST ABEL 

Makes such a vision to the sight 

As fills a father's eyes with light ; 

And pleasures flow in so thick and fast 66s 

Upon his heart, that he at last 

Must needs express his love's excess 

With words of unmeant bitterness. 

Perhaps 'tis pretty to force together 

Thoughts so unlike each other ; 67 ° 

To mutter and mock a broken charm, 

To dally with wrong that does no harm. 

Perhaps 'tis tender too and pretty 

At each wild word to feel within 

A sweet recoil of love and pity. 675 

And what if in a world of sin 

(O sorrow and shame should this be true!) 

Such giddiness of heart and brain 

Comes seldom save from rage and pain, 

So talks as it's most used to do. - 68 ° 



The Picture 



OR THE LOVERS RESOLUTION. 



S. T. Coleridge. 

Through weeds, and thorns, and matted underwood, 

I force my way; now climb, and now descend 

O'er rocks, or 1 bare or mossy, with wild foot 

Crushing the purple whorts; 2 while, oft unseen, 

Hurrying along the drifted forest-leaves, 5 

The scared snake rustles. Onward still I toil 

I know not, ask not whither ! A new joy, 

Lovely as light, sudden as summer gust, 

And gladsome as the first-born 2a of the spring, 

Beckons me on, or follows from behind, I0 

Playmate, or guide ! The master-passion 3 quelled, 

I feel that I am free. With dun-red bark 

The fir-trees, and the unfrequent slender oak, 

Forth from this tangle wild of bush and brake 

Soar up, and from a melancholy 4 vault IS 

High o'er me, murmuring like a distant sea. 

Here Wisdom might resort, and here Remorse; 
Here too the love-lorn man, who, sick in soul, 
And of this busy human heart aweary, 

1 either 

2 whortleberry. 2 a earliest flowers. 

3 love. 

4 Coleridge is scarcely consistent. In To a Friend he wrote : — 

" On a bleak rock, midway the Aonian mount, 
There stands a lone and melancholy tree." 
In The Nightingale, — 

" In Nature there is nothing melancholy." 

199 



200 THE PICTURE 

Worships the spirit of unconscious life 20 

In tree or wild-flower. — Gentle lunatic ! 

If so he might not wholly cease to be, 

He would far rather not be that, he is ; 

But would be something, that he knows not of, 

In winds or waters, or among the rocks ! 2 5 

But hence, fond wretch ! 5 breathe not contagion here ; 
No myrtle walks 6 are these : these are no groves 
Where Love dare loiter! If in sullen mood 
He should stray hither, the low stumps shall gore 
His dainty feet, the briar and the thorn 30 

Make his plumes haggard. 7 Like a wounded bird 
Easily caught, ensnare him, O ye Nymphs, 
Ye Oreads chaste, ye dusky Dryades ! 
And you, ye earth- winds ! you that make at morn, 
The dew drops quiver on the spiders' webs ! 35 

This is my hour of triumph ! I can now 
With my own fancies play the merry fool, 8 
And laugh away worse folly, being free. 
Here will I seat myself, beside this old, 
Hollow, and weedy oak, which ivy-twine 40 

Clothes as with net-work : here will I couch my limbs, 
Close by this river, in this silent shade, 
As safe and sacred from the step of man 
As an invisible world — unheard, unseen, 
And listening only to the pebbly brook 45 

5 foolish lover. 

The myrtle was sacred to Venus. 

7 ruffled. 

8 " Let me play the fool ! 

With sport and laughter let old wrinkles come ! " 

— The Merchant. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 201 

That murmurs with a dead, 9 yet tinkling 10 sound ; 

Or to the bees, that in the neighboring trunk 

Make honey-hoards. The breeze that visits me 

Was never Love's accomplice, never raised 

The tendril ringlets from the maiden's brow, so 

And the blue, delicate veins above her cheek 

Ne'er played the wanton — never half-disclosed 

The maiden's snowy bosom, scattering thence 

Eye-poisons for some love-distempered youth, 

Who ne'er henceforth may see an aspen-grove ss 

Shiver in sunshine, but his feeble heart 

Shall flow away like a dissolving thing. 

Sweet breeze! thou only, if I guess aright, 
Liftest the feathers of the robin's X1 breast, 
That swells its little breast, so full of song 6o 

Singing above me, on the mountain-ash. 
And thou too, desert stream ! no pool of thine, 
Though clear as lake, in latest summer-eve, 
Did e'er reflect the stately virgin's robe, 
The face, the form divine, the downcast look 65 

Contemplative ! 12 Behold ; her open palm 
Presses her cheek and brow ! her elbow rests 
On the bare branch of half up-rooted tree, 
That leans towards 13 its mirror ! Who li erewhile 
Had from her countenance turned, or looked by stealth 7 ° 
(For fear is true love's cruel nurse), he now, 
With steadfast gaze and unoffending eye, 



10 a contradiction? 

11 The English robin, not our bird of that name. 

12 Accent the antepenult. 

" Pronounce in two syllables, accenting the last, 
14 Antecedent in line 71. 



202 THE PICTURE 

Worships the watery 15 idol, dreaming hopes 

Delicious to the soul, but fleeting, vain, 

E'en as that phantom world on which he gazed, 7S 

But not unheeded gazed : for see, ah ! see, 

The sportive tyrant with her left hand plucks 

The heads of tall flowers that behind her grow, 

Lychnis, and willow-herb, and foxglove bells : 

And suddenly, as one that toys with time, 8o 

Scatters them on the pool ! Then all the charm 

Is broken — all that phantom-world so fair 

Vanishes, and a thousand circlets spread, 

And each mis-shapes the other. Stay awhile, 

Poor youth, who scarcely dar'st lift up thine eyes, 8s 

The stream will soon renew its smoothness, soon 

The visions will return ! And lo ! he stays : 16 

And soon the fragments dim of lovely forms 

Come trembling back, unite, and now once more 

The pool becomes a mirror ; and behold 9 ° 

Each wild-flower 1T on the marge inverted there, 

And there the half-uprooted tree — but where, 

O where the virgin's snowy arm, that leaned 

On its bare branch ? He turns, and she is gone ! 

Homeward she steals through many a woodland maze 9S 

Which he shall seek in vain. Ill-fated youth ! 

Go, day by day, and waste thy manly prime 

In mad love-yearning by the vacant brook, 

Till sickly thoughts bewitch thine eyes, and thou 

Behold'st her shadow still abiding there, I0 ° 

The Naiad of the mirror ! 



15 Her reflection in the water. 
10 His " hour of triumph " seemed over. 
17 " And asters by the brookside 
Make asters in the brook." 

— H. H. 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 203 

Not to thee, 

wild and desert stream ! belongs this tale : 
Gloomy and dark art thou — the crowded firs 
Spire from thy shores, and stretch across thy bed, 
Making thee doleful as a cavern-well : I0S 
Save when the shy king-fishers 18 build their nest 

On thy steep banks, no loves hast thou, wild stream ! 

This be my chosen haunt — emancipate 
From passion's dreams, a freeman, and alone, 

1 rise and trace its devious course. O lead, II0 
Lead me to deeper shades and lonelier glooms. 

Lo ! stealing through the canopy of firs, 

How fair the sunshine spots that mossy rock, 

Isle of the river, whose disparted waves 

Dart off asunder with an angry sound, IIS 

How soon to re-unite ! And see ! they meet, 19 

Each in the other lost and found : and see 

Placeless, as spirits, one soft-water sun 

Throbbing within them, heart at once and eye ! 

With its soft neighborhood of filmy clouds, I2 ° 

The stains and shadings of forgotten tears, 

Dimness o'erswum with luster ! Such the hour 

Of deep enjoyment, following love's brief feuds; 

And hark, the noise of a near waterfall ! 

I pass forth into light — I find myself I25 

Beneath a weeping birch (most beautiful 

Of forest-trees, the lady 20 of the woods), 

Hard by the brink of a tall weedy rock 

That overbrows the cataract. How bursts 



Live in holes in the bank, ready dug. 
Note the metaphor. 
Most shy and lady-like of trees." — Lowell. 



2Q4 THE PICTURE 

The landscape on my sight ! Two crescent hills I3 ° 

Fold in behind each other, and so make 

A circular vale, and land-locked, as might seem, 

With brook and bridge, and gray stone cottages, 

Half hid by rocks and fruit-trees. At my feet, 

The whortleberries are bedewed with spray, I3S 

Dashed upwards by the furious waterfall. 

How solemnly the pendent ivy-mass 

Swings in its winnow ; 21 all the air is calm. 

The smoke from cottage chimneys, tinged with light, 

Rises in columns ; from this house alone, I4 ° 

Close by the waterfall, the column slants, 

And feels its ceaseless breeze. But what is this ? 22 

That cottage, with its slanting chimney-smoke, 

And close beside its porch a sleeping child, 

His dear head pillowed on a sleeping dog — J 45 

One arm between its forelegs, and the hand 

Holds loosely its small handful of wild flowers, 

Unfilletted, and of unequal lengths. 

A curious picture, with a master's haste 

Sketched on a strip of pinky-silver skin, x 5° 

Peeled from the birchen bark ! Divinest maid ! 

Yon bark her canvas, and those purple berries 

Her pencil ! See, the juice is scarcely dried 

On the fine skin ! She has been newly here ; 

And lo ! yon patch of heath, has been her couch — j ss 

The pressure still remains ! O blessed couch ! 

For this mayst thou flower early, and the sun, 

Slanting at eve, rest bright, and linger long 

Upon thy purple bells ! O Isabel ! 23 

21 a pendent streamer moving in the wind. 
22 " A curious picture," line 149. 

23 The artist who had painted " the picture," and then taken 
herself away ; but from the signs, " se citpit ante videri." 



SAMUEL T. COLERIDGE 205 

Daughter of genius! stateliest of our maids! i6j 

Afore beautiful than whom Alcaeus 2i wooed, 

The Lesbian woman 25 of immortal song ! 

O child of genius ! stately, beautiful, 

And full of love to all, save only me, 

And not ungentle e'en to me ! My heart, l65 

Why beats it thus? Through yonder coppice-wood 

Needs must the pathway turn, that leads straightway 

On to her father's house. She is alone ! 

The night draws on — such ways are hard to hit 20 — 

And fit it is I should restore this sketch, I7 ° 

Dropt unawares no doubt. Why should I yearn 

To keep the relique ? 'twill but idly feed 

The passion that consumes me. Let me haste! 

The picture in my hand which she has left; 

She cannot blame me that 1 I followed her : J 7s 

And I may be her guide the long wood through. 



A lyric poet of Greece. 

Sappho. " Where burning Sappho loved and sung." — Byron. 

Such paths are hard to follow. 




CHARLES JAMES FOX 



CHARLES JAMES FOX. 

» 

1 749- 1 806. 

In one of Macaulay's fascinating biographical es- 
says, The Late Lord Holland, — the writer says : " Dur- 
ing more than a century, there has never been a time 
at which a Fox has not stood in a prominent station 
among public men. Scarcely had the checkered career 
of the first Lord Holland (Henry Fox) closed, when 
his son, Charles, rose to the head of the Opposition, and 
to the first rank among English debaters." 

This son, not being the eldest son, did not inherit 
the title and had no need of it. The reader of English 
history during the intense years of the American and 
the French revolutions must conclude that Charles 
James Fox was one of the most wonderful men that 
ever played a part, on the stage of the world's great 
theater. 

He spent the years of his manhood in the English 
Parliament, and at different crises was a cabinet min- 
ister. His portrait as an orator, or debater, is painted 
in the following extracts : — 

" Never in my life did I hear anything equal to Fox's 
speeches in reply — they were wonderful." — Samuel 
Rogers. 

" Pitt I never heard : Fox but once, and then he 
struck me as a debater, which to me seems as different 
from an orator as an improvisatore from a poet." — 
Byron. 

" When he got fairly into his subject, was heartily 
warmed with it, he poured forth words and periods of 

207 



208 CHARLES JAMES FOX 

fire that smote you, and deprived you of all power to 
reflect and rescue yourself, whilst he went on to seize 
the faculties of the listener, and carry them captive 
along with him withersoever he pleased to rush."' — Ed- 
inburgh Review, 1834. 

"It mattered very much indeed that on the transcend- 
ent decision whether America was to be enslaved or 
pacified, Fox should have nothing to unsay. He came 
to the great argument fresh and unhampered, his mind 
and body full of elasticity and strength. Without mis- 
giving, without flagging, and with small thought of self, 
he devoted an eloquence already mature, and an intellect 
daily and visibly ripening to a cause which more than 
any one else he contributed to make intelligible, attractive, 
and at length irresistible." — Trevelyan's The American 
Revolution. 

Fox's power as a statesman, as a leader of men, is 
attested by such judges as the following. Continuing 
the above characterization, and closing a chapter, the 
first in the book, entitled Charles James Fox, Trevelyan 
wrote : " That cause at its commencement found him 
with a broken career. Its triumph placed him in the 
position of the first subject, and even (considering that 
his principal antagonist had been the king himself) of 
the first man in the country." 

" Fox is a most extraordinary man : here is a man 
who has divided the kingdom with Caesar; so that it 
was a doubt whether the nation should be ruled by the 
scepter of George the Third or the tongue of Fox." — 
Dr. Johnson. 

" It may be said once for all that Fox was the most 
transcendent of all debaters, the most genial of all asso- 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 209 

ciates, the most beloved of all friends. He was more- 
over, after Burke, the most lettered politician in a 
generation that affected literature. 

* * * 

" His nature, apt to extremes, was driven with an ex- 
cessive reaction to the most violent negative of what he 
disapproved. We see the same excess to a still greater 
degree in his still greater master Burke. It is this 
force of extremes that makes orators. 

* * * 

"The mastering passion of Fox's mature life was the 
love of liberty : it is this which made him take a vigorous, 
occasionally an intemperate, part against every man or 
measure in which he could trace the taint or tendency 
to oppression ; it is this which sometimes made him write 
and speak with unworthy bitterness : but it is this which 
gave him moral power, which has neutralized the errors 
of his political career, which makes his faults forgotten 
and his memory sweet." — Rosebery's Pitt. 

The name of Fox will always bring before the 
reader's consciousness that of Pitt and of Burke, " the 
wondrous three whose words were sparks of immor- 
tality ; " as in another great parliament, the name of 
Webster suggests Clay and Calhoun. In neither instance 
were the three giants always found upon one side. Prob- 
ably no specimen of forensic eloquence is more familiar 
to " every schoolboy " than Chatham's — the elder Pitt's 
— appeals for the rights of America, and we associate 
these with Burke's potent speeches on American Taxation 
and on Conciliation with America. 

One would not think that this strange genius whose 
early life affords a justification for the part he is made 
14 



210 CHARLES JAMES FOX 

to play in recent historical romance, this glowing impet- 
uous orator would ever seat himself to the quiet, delib- 
erate task of writing history, or that, if he so did, it 
would be A History of the Early Part of the Reign of 
James the Second. But the book is on our shelves, and' 
in his choice of words the author was careful to use none 
not found in Dryden. Macaulay, in his essay on Mack- 
intosh's History of the Revolution in England, in 1688, 
speaks slightingly of Fox's extreme attention to the 
niceties of language. He plainly does not think the ora- 
tor's style best for the historian, but he says : " We at 
once recognize that consummate master of the whole art 
of intellectual gladiatorship." 



Charles James Fox 



Speech in the Debate in Parliament on the French Over- 
tures 1 for Peace, February 3, 1800. 

1 Mr. Speaker, — At so late an hour of the night I am 
sure you will do me the justice to believe that I do not 
mean to go at length into the discussion of this great 
question. Exhausted as the attention of the House must 
be, and unaccustomed as I have been of late to attend 
in my place, nothing but a deep sense of my duty could 
have induced me to trouble you at all, and particularly 
to request your indulgence at such an hour. Sir, my hon- 
orable and learned friend has truly said that the present 
is a new era in the war. The right honorable, the Chan- 
cellor 2 of the Exchequer, feels the justice of the remark; 
for by traveling back to the commencement of the war, 
and referring to all the topics and arguments which he 
has so often and so successfully urged to the House, and 
by which he has drawn them on to the support of his 
measures, he is forced to acknowledge that, at the end of 
a seven years' conflict, we are come but to a new era in 
the war, at which he thinks it necessary only to press all 
his former arguments to induce us to persevere. All the 
topics which have so often misled us — all the reasoning 
which has so invariably failed — all the lofty predictions 
which have so constantly been falsified by events — all 

1 Bonaparte had just been made First Consul, and directly to 
King George made these overtures. 

2 William Pitt. 



2i2 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

the hopes which have amused the sanguine, and all the 
assurances of the distress and weakness of the enemy 
which have satisfied the unthinking, are again enumer- 
ated and advanced as arguments for our continuing the 
war. What! at the end of seven years of the most bur- 
densome and the most calamitous struggle that this 
country was ever engaged in, are we again to be amused 
with notions of finance and calculations of the exhausted 
resources of the enemy as a ground of confidence and of 
hope? Gracious God! Were we not told, five years 
ago, that France was not only on the brink, but that she 
was actually in the gulf of bankruptcy? Were we not 
told, as an unanswerable argument against treating, that 
she could not hold out another campaign — that nothing 
but peace could save her — that she wanted only time to 
recruit her exhausted finances — that to grant her repose 
was to grant her the means of again molesting this 
country, and that we had nothing to do but persevere 
for a short time, in order to save ourselves forever from 
the consequences of her ambition and her Jacobinism ? 3 
What ! after having gone on from year to year upon 
assurances like these, and after having seen the repeated 
refutations of every prediction, are we again to be seri- 
ously told that we have the same prospect of success on 
the same identical grounds? And without any other 
argument or security, are we invited, at this new era 
of the war, to carry it on upon principles which, if 
adopted, may make it eternal? If the right honorable 
gentleman shall succeed in prevailing on Parliament and 

3 Jacobus, James. Those Englishmen who adhered to James II. 
after his expulsion were termed Jacobites. In France violent and 
factious opposition to existing government took, or was given, the 
name of Jacobinism. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 213 

the country to adopt the principles which he has advanced 
this night, I see no possible termination to the contest. 
No man can see an end to it; and upon the assurances 
and predictions which have so uniformly failed, are we 
called upon, not merely to refuse all negotiation, but to 
countenance principles and views as distant from wisdom 
and justice as they are in their nature wild and imprac- 
ticable. 

2 I must lament, Sir, in common with every friend of 
peace, the harsh and unconciliating language which min- 
isters have held toward the French, and which they have 
even made use of in their answer to a respectful offer of 
negotiation. Such language has ever been considered as 
extremely unwise, and has ever been reprobated by dip- 
lomatic men. I remember with pleasure the terms in 
which Lord Malmsbury 4 at Paris, in the year 1796, 
replied to expressions of this sort used by M. de la Croix. 
He justly said, " that offensive and injurious insinua- 
tions were only calculated to throw new obstacles in the 
way of accommodation, and that it was not by revolting 
reproaches, nor by reciprocal invective, that a sincere 
wish to accomplish the great work of pacification could 
be evinced." Nothing could be more proper nor more 
wise than this language ; and such ought ever to be the 
tone and conduct of men entrusted with the very impor- 
tant task of treating with an hostile nation. Being a 
sincere friend to peace, I must say with Lord Malmes- 



1 Pitt made repeated overtures for peace. " In October, 1796, 
Lord Malmsbury, a diplomatist of the highest distinction, was sent to 
Paris. But as had happened in March, the envoy's instructions to 
insist on the evacuation of the Netherlands by France rendered nego- 
tiation fruitless. On the 19th of December he was ordered to leave 
France within forty-eight hours." — Rosebery's Pitt. 



2i 4 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

bury, that it is not by reproaches and by invective that 
we can hope for a reconciliation ; and I am convinced in 
my own mind that I speak the sense of this House, and 
of a majority of the people of this country, when I 
lament that any unnecessary recriminations should be 
flung out by which obstacles are put in the way of 
pacification. I believe that it is the prevailing sentiment 
of the people that we ought to abstain from. harsh and 
insulting language ; and in common with them I must 
lament that both in the papers of Lord Grenville, and 
in the speeches of this night, such license has been given 
to the invective and reproach. For the same reason I 
must lament that the right honorable gentleman has 
thought proper to go at such length, and with such se- 
verity of minute investigation, into all the early circum- 
stances of the war, which, whatever they were, are 
nothing to the present purpose, and ought not to in- 
fluence the present feelings of the House. 

3 I certainly shall not follow him into all the minute 
detail, though I do not agree with him in many of his 
assertions. I do not know what impression his narrative 
may make on other gentlemen; but I will tell him, fairly 
and candidly, he has not convinced me. I continue to 
think, and until I see better grounds for changing my 
opinion than any that the right honorable gentleman has 
this night produced, I shall continue to think and to say, 
plainly and explicitly, -that this country was the aggressor 
in the war. But with regard to Austria and Prussia — is 
there a man who for one moment can dispute that they 
were the aggressors? 

4 Let us suppose the case to be that of Great Britain. 
Will any gentleman say, if two of the great powers 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 215 

should make a public declaration that they were deter- 
mined to make an attack on this kingdom as soon as cir- 
cumstances should favor their intention ; that they only 
waited for this occasion ; and that in the meantime they 
would keep their forces ready for the purpose; that it 
would not be considered by the parliament and people 
of this country as an hostile aggression? And is there 
an Englishman in existence who is such a friend to peace 
as to say that the nation could retain its honor and dig- 
nity if it should sit down under such a menace? I know 
too well what is due to the national character of Eng- 
land to believe that there would be two opinions on the 
case, if thus put home to our own feelings and under- 
standing. We must, then, respect in others the indigna- 
tion which such an act would excite in ourselves ; and 
when we see it established on the most indisputable 
testimony, that both at Pilnitz 5 and at Mantua declara- 
tions were made to this effect, it is idle to say that, as 
far as the Emperor and the king of Prussia were con- 
cerned, that they were not the aggressors in the war. 
5 " Oh ! but the decree of the 19th of November, 1792! 6 
that, at least," the right honorable gentleman says', " you 
must allow to be an act of aggression, not only against 
England, but against all the sovereigns of Europe." I 



In August, 1 79 1, the King of Prussia and the Emperor of 
Austria concluded a treaty at Pilnitz, and issued a declaration to the 
effect that the cause of Louis XVL was conditionally made the cause 
of all the monarchs of Europe. 

u Upon this date the National Convention passed its Decree of 
Fraternization, proffering in the name of the French nation frater- 
nity and assistance to all those people who wish to procure liberty, 
and charging the executive to order the generals to act in the spirit 
of this decree. This magnificent vaunt sprang from recent military 
successes. 



216 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

am not one of those, Sir, who attach much interest to the 
general and indiscriminate provocations thrown out at 
random, like this resolution of the 19th of November, 
1792. I do not think it necessary to the dignity of any 
people to notice and to apply to themselves menaces flung 
out without particular allusion, which are always un- 
wise in the power which uses them, and which it is still 
more unwise to treat with seriousness. But if any such 
idle and general provocation to nations is given, either 
in insolence or in folly, by any government, it is a clear 
first principle that an explanation is the thing which a 
magnanimous nation, feeling itself aggrieved, ought to 
demand; and if an explanation be given which is not 
satisfactory, it ought clearly and distinctly to say so. 
There ought to be no ambiguity, no reserve, on the 
occasion. Now we all know from documents on our 
table that M. Chauvelin did give an explanation of this 
silly decree. He declared in the name of his government 
" that it was never meant that the French government 
should favor insurrections ; that the decree was appli- 
cable only to those people who, after having acquired 
their liberty by conquest, should demand the assistance 
of the republic; but that France would respect, not only 
the independence of England, but also that of her allies 
with whom she was not at war." This was the explana- 
tion given of the offensive decree. " But this explanation 
was not satisfactory ! " 7 Did you say so to M. Chau- 



7 France had, on every occasion, since the commencement of her 
revolution, expressed a constant and anxious solicitude to preserve a 
good understanding with this country. Nothing can be more emphat- 
ically expressive of these sentiments than the note which M. de 
Chauvelin presented upon this subject to Lord Grenville. — Miller's 
Continuation of Hume'? History of England, 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 217 

velin? Did you tell him that you were not content with 
this explanation? And when you dismissed him after- 
ward, on the death of the king 8 did you say that this 
explanation was unsatisfactory ? No ; you did no such 
thing : and I contend that unless you demanded further 
explanations, and they were refused, you have no right 
to urge the decree of the 19th of November as an act of 
aggression. 

6 The right honorable gentleman has this night, for the 
first time, produced a most important paper — the in- 
structions which were given to his Majesty's minister 
at the court of St. Petersburg about the end of the year 
1792, to interest her Imperial Majesty 9 to join her efforts 
with those of his Britannic Majesty to prevent, by their 
joint mediation, the evils of a general war. Of this 
paper, and of the existence of any such document, I for 
one was entirely ignorant ; but I have no hesitation in 
saying that I completely approve of the instructions 
which appear to have been given ; and I am sorry to see 
the right honorable gentleman disposed rather to take 
blame to himself than credit for having written it. He 
thinks that he shall be subject to the imputation of hav- 
ing been rather too slow to apprehend the dangers with 
which the French revolution was fraught, than that he 
was forward and hasty — "Quod solum cxcusat, hoc 
solum miror in illo." 10 I do not agree with him on the 
idea of censure. I by no means think that he was blame- 
able for too much confidence in the good intentions of 



"Louis XVI. 
9 Empress Catherine. 

10 " The thing which he would excuse is the one thing in him 
which I admire." 



218 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

the French. I think the tenor and composition of this 
paper was excellent — the instructions conveyed in it 
wise; and that it wanted but one essential thing to have 
entitled it to general approbation — namely, to be acted 
upon. The clear nature and intent of that paper I take 
to be, that our ministers were to solicit the court of 
Petersburg to join with them in a declaration to the 
French government, stating explicitly what course of 
conduct, with respect to their foreign relations, they 
thought necessary to the general peace and security of 
Europe, and what, if complied with, would have induced 
them to mediate for that purpose — a proper, wise, and 
legitimate course of proceeding. Now I ask, Sir, 
whether, if this paper had been communicated to Paris 
at the end of the year 1792, instead of Petersburg, it 
would not have been productive of most seasonable bene- 
fits to mankind ; and by informing the French in time of 
the means by which they might have secured the media- 
tion of Great Britain, have not only avoided the rupture 
with this country, but have also restored general peace 
to the continent? The paper, Sir, was excellent in its 
intentions ; but its merit was all in the composition. It 
was a fine theory, which ministers did not think proper 
to carry into practice. Nay, on the contrary, at the very 
time they were drawing up this paper they were insult- 
ing M. Chauvelin in every way, until about the 23d or 
24th of January, 1793, when they finally dismissed him, 
without stating any one ground upon which they were 
willing to preserve terms with the French. 
7 " But France," it seems, "then declared war against 
us ; and she was the aggressor, because the declaration 
came from her." Let us look at the circumstances of 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 219 

this transaction on both sides. Undoubtedly the declara- 
tion was made by her ; but is a declaration the only thing 
that constitutes the commencement of a war? Do gen- 
tlemen recollect that, in consequence of a dispute about 
the commencement of war, respecting the capture of a 
number of ships, an article was inserted in our treaty 
with France, by which it was positively stipulated that in 
future, to prevent all disputes, the act of the dismissal of 
a minister from either of the two courts should be held 
and considered as tantamount to a declaration of war? 
I mention this, Sir, because when we are idly employed 
in this retrospect of the origin of a war which has lasted 
so many years, instead of fixing our eyes only to the con- 
templation of the means of putting an end to it, we seem 
disposed to overlook everything on our own parts, and 
to search only for grounds of imputation on the enemy. 
I almost think it an insult on the House to detain them 
with this sort of examination. 

8 I really, Sir, cannot think it necessary to follow the 
right honorable gentleman into all the minute details 
which he has thought proper to give us respecting the 
first aggression ; but that Austria and Prussia were the 
aggressors not a man in any country, who has ever given 
himself the trouble to think at all on the subject, can 
doubt. Nothing could be more hostile than their whole 
proceedings. Did they not declare to France that it was 
their internal concerns, not their external proceedings, 
which provoked them to confederate against her? Look 
back to the proclamations with which they set out. Read 
the declarations which they made themselves to justify 
their appeal to arms. They did not pretend to fear their 
ambition, their conquests, their troubling their neighbors ; 



220 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

but they accused them of new-modeling their own gov- 
ernment. They said nothing of their aggressions abroad ; 
they spoke only of their clubs and societies at Paris. 
9 Sir, in all this I am not justifying the French — I am 
not striving to absolve them from blame, either in their 
internal or external policy. I think, on the contrary, that 
their successive rulers have been as bad and as execrable, 
in various instances, as any of the most despotic and un- 
principled governments that the world ever saw. I 
think it impossible, Sir, that it should have been other- 
wise. It was not to be expected that the French, when 
once engaged in foreign wars, should not endeavor to 
spread destruction around them, and to form plans of 
aggrandizement and plunder on every side. Men bred 
in the school of the House of Bourbon could not be ex- 
pected to act otherwise. They could not have lived so 
long under their ancient masters without imbibing the 
restless ambition, the perfidy, and the insatiable spirit of 
the race. They have imitated the practice of their great 
prototype, and through their whole career of mischief 
and of crimes have done no more than servilely trace the 
steps of their own Louis XIV. If they have overrun 
countries and ravaged them, they have done it upon 
Bourbon principles. If they have ruined and dethroned 
sovereigns, it is entirely after the Bourbon manner. If 
they have even fraternized with the people of foreign 
countries, and pretended to make their cause their own, 
they have only faithfully followed the Bourbon example. 
They have constantly had Louis, the grand monarque, 
in their eye. 

10 But it may be said that this example was long ago, 
and that we ought not to refer to a period so distant. 
True, it is a distant period as applied to the man, but 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 221 

not so to the principle. The principle was never extinct ; 
nor has its operation been suspended in .France, except, 
perhaps, for a short interval during the administration of 
Cardinal Fleury ; and my complaint against the republic 
of France is, not that she has generated new crimes, not 
that she has promulgated new mischief, but that she has 
adopted and acted upon the principles which have been 
so fatal to Europe under the practice of the House of 
Bourbon. It is said that wherever the French have 
gone, they have introduced revolution ; that they have 
sought for the means of disturbing neighboring states, 
and have not been content with mere conquest. What is 
this but adopting the ingenious scheme of Louis XIV. ? 
He was not content with merely overrunning a state ; — 
whenever he came into a new territory he established 
what he called his Chamber of Claims ; a most convenient 
device, by which he inquired whether the conquered 
country or province had any" dormant or disputed claims, 
any cause of complaint, any unsettled demand upon any 
other state or province — upon which he might wage 
war upon such state, thereby discover again ground for 
new devastation, and gratify his ambition by new ac- 
quisitions. What have the republicans done more atro- 
cious, more Jacobinical, than this? 
11 Louis went to war with Holland. His pretext was 
that Holland had not treated him with sufficient respect ; 
— a very just and proper cause for war, indeed! This, 
Sir, leads me to an example which I think seasonable, 
and worthy the attention of his Majesty's ministers. 
When our Charles II., as a short exception to the policy 
of his reign, made the triple alliance 1X for the protection 



England, Holland, Sweden. 



222 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

of Europe, and particularly of Holland, against the am- 
bition of Louis XIV., what was the conduct of that great, 
virtuous, and most able statesman, M. de Witt 12 when 
the confederates came to deliberate on the terms upon 
which they should treat with the French monarch? 
When it was said that he had made unprincipled con- 
quests, and that he ought to be forced to surrender them 
all, what was the language of the great and wise man? 
"No," said he; "I think we ought not to look back to 
the origin of the war so much as to the means of putting 
an end to it. If you had united in time to prevent these 
conquests, well; but now that he has made them, he 
stands upon the ground of conquest, and we must agree 
to treat with him, not with reference to the origin of 
the conquest but with regard to his present posture. 
He has those places, and some of them we must be con- 
tent to give up as the means of peace, for conquest will 
always successfully set up its claims to indemnification." 
Such was the language of this minister, who was the 
ornament of his time ; and such, in my mind, ought to be 
the language of statesmen with regard to the French at 
this day. The same ought to have been said at the forma- 
tion of the confederacy. It was true that the French had 
overrun Savoy; but they had overrun it upon Bourbon 
principles ; and having gained this and other conquests 
before the confederacy was formed, they ought to have 
treated with her rather for future security than for past 



12 Grand Pensionary de Witt, a stout upholder of pure republican 
government in Holland. A few years after the time alluded to in the 
text, England and France were combined against Holland. De Witt, 
to save something from such odds offered terms which roused the 
populace to fury. De Witt and his brother were slain. The young 
Prince of Orange, afterward William III. of England, was made 
Stadtholder for life. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 223 

correction. States in possession, whether monarchial or 
republican, will claim indemnity in proportion to their 
success ; and it will never be so much inquired by what 
right they gained possession as by what means they can 
be prevented from enlarging their depredations. Such 
is the safe practice of the world ; and such ought to have 
been the conduct of the powers when the reduction of 
Savoy made them coalesce. 

12 The right honorable gentleman may know more of the 
secret particulars of their overrunning Savoy than I do; 
but certainly, as they have come to my knowledge, it was 
a most Bourbon-like act. A great and justly celebrated 
historian, whom I will not call a foreigner — I mean Mr. 
Hume (a writer certainly estimable in many particulars, 
but who was a childish lover of princes) — talks of Louis 
XIV. in very magnificent terms ; but he says of him that, 
though he managed his enterprises with skill and bravery, 
he was unfortunate in this, that he never got a good and 
fair pretense for war. This he reckons among his mis-' 
fortunes ! Can we say more of the republican French ? 
In seizing on Savoy I think they made use of the words, 
" convenances morales et physiques." 13 These were 
their reasons. A most Bourbon-like phrase ! And I 
therefore contend that as we never scrupled to treat with 
the princes of the House of Bourbon on account of their 
rapacity, their thirst of conquest, their violation of treat- 
ies, their perfidy, and their restless spirit, so we ought 
not to refuse to treat with their republican imitators. 
Ministers could not pretend ignorance of the unprincipled 
manner in which the French had seized on Savoy. The 



u " France and Savoy were already connected by physical and 
moral ties." This was part of France's claim. 



224 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

Sardinian minister complained of the aggression, and 
yet no stir was made about it. The courts of Europe 
stood by and saw the outrage ; and our minister saw it. 
At that time, however, the right honorable gentleman 
makes it his boast that he was prevented by a sense of 
neutrality from taking any measures of precaution on 
the subject. I do not give the right honorable gentleman 
much credit for his spirit of neutrality on the occasion. 
It flowed from the sense of the country at the time, the 
great majority of which was clearly and decidedly against 
all interruptions being given to the French in their de- 
sire of regulating their own internal government. 
13 My opinion is, that when the unfortunate King of 
France offered to us, in the letter delivered by M. Chau- 
velin and M. Talleyrand, and even entreated us to medi- 
ate between him and the allied powers of Austria and 
Prussia, we ought to have accepted the offer and exerted 
our influence to save Europe from the consequence of a 
system which was then beginning to manifest itself. It 
was, at least, a question of prudence ; and as we had never 
refused to treat and to mediate with the old princes on 
account of their ambition or their perfidy, we ought to 
have been equally ready now, when the same principles 
were acted upon by other men. I must doubt the sensi- 
bility which could be so cold and so indifferent at the 
proper moment for its activity. I fear that there was at 
that moment the germs of ambition rising in the mind of 
the right honorable gentleman, and that he was begin- 
ning, like others, to entertain hopes that something might 
be obtained out of the coming confusion. What but 
such a sentiment could have prevented him .from over- 
looking the fair occasion that was offered for preventing 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 225 

the calamities with which Europe was threatened ? What 
but some such interested principle could have made him 
forego the truly honorable task by which his administra- 
tion would have displayed its magnanimity and its power ? 
But for some such feeling would not this country, both 
in wisdom and in dignity, have interfered, and in con- 
junction with the other powers have said to France, 
" You ask for a mediation; we will mediate with candor 
and sincerity, but we will at the same time declare to 
you our apprehensions. 

14 " We do not trust to your assertion of a determination 
to avoid all foreign conquest, and that you are desirous 
only of settling your own constitution, because your lan- 
guage is contradicted by experience and the evidence 
of facts. You are Frenchmen, and you cannot so soon 
have thrown off the Bourbon principles in which you 
were educated. You have already imitated the bad prac- 
tice of your princes ; you have seized on Savoy 14 with- 
out a color of right. But here we take our stand. Thus 
far you have gone, and we cannot help it ; but you must 
go no farther. W T e will tell you distinctly what we shall 
consider as an attack on the balance and the security of 
Europe ; and, as the condition of our interference, we 
will tell you also the securities that we think essential 
to the general repose." This ought to have been the lan- 
guage of his Majesty's ministers when their mediation 
was solicited ; and something of this kind they evidently 
thought of when they sent the instructions to Peters- 



14 The National Convention by decree, 1792, erected the duchy 
of Savoy into a department of the French Republic, contrary to an 
article of the constitution in which she renounced all foreign con- 
quest. It is so much easier to let go before taking hold. 



226 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

burg which they have mentioned this night, but upon 
which they never acted. Having not done so, I say they 
have no claim to talk now about the violated rights of 
Europe, about the aggression of the French, and about 
the origin of the war in which this country was so sud- 
denly afterward plunged. Instead of this, what did 
they do? They hung back; they avoided explanation; 
they gave the French no means of satisfying them; and 
I repeat my proposition — when there is a question of 
peace and war between two nations, that government 
feels itself in the wrong which refuses to state with 
clearness and precision what she would consider as a 
satisfaction and a pledge of peace. 

15 Sir, if I understand the true precepts of the Christian 
religion, as set forth in the New Testament, I must be 
permitted to say that there is no such thing as a rule or 
doctrine by which we are directed, or can be justified, in 
waging a war for religion. The idea is subversive of the 
very foundations upon which it stands, which are those 
of peace and good-will among men. Religion never was, 
and never can be, a justifiable cause of war; but it has 
been too often grossly used as the pretext and the apol- 
ogy for the most unprincipled wars. 

16 I have already said, and I repeat it, that the conduct 
of the French to foreign nations cannot be justified. 
They have given great cause of offense, but certainly not 
to all countries alike. The right honorable gentlemen op- 
posite to me have made an indiscriminate catalogue of all 
the countries which the French have offended, and, in 
their eagerness to throw odium on the nation, have taken 
no pains to investigate the sources of their several quar- 
rels. I will not detain the House by entering into the long 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 227 

detail which has been given of their aggressions and 
their violences ; but let me mention Sardinia as one in- 
stance which has been strongly insisted upon. Did the 
French attack Sardinia when at peace with them? No 
such thing. The King of Sardinia had accepted of a 
subsidy from Great Britain ; and Sardinia was, to all in- 
tents and purposes, a belligerent power. Several other 
instances might be mentioned ; but though perhaps in 
the majority of instances the French may be unjustifi- 
able, is this the moment for us to dwell upon these enor- 
mities — to waste our time and inflame our passions by 
recriminating upon each other? There is no end to such 
a war. I have somewhere read, I think in Sir Walter 
Raleigh's 15 History of the World, of a most bloody and 
fatal battle which was fought by two opposite armies, in 
which almost all the combatants on both sides were 
killed, " because," says the historian, " though they had 
offensive weapons on both sides, they had none for de- 
fense." So, in this war of words, if we are to use only 
offensive weapons, if we are to indulge only in invective 
and abuse, the contest must be eternal. 
17 Surely, Sir, if we must be thus rigid in scrutinizing 
the conduct of an enemy, we ought to be equally careful 
in not committing our honor and our safety with an ally 
who has manifested the same want of respect for the 
rights of other nations. Surely, if it is material to know 
the character of a power with whom you are only about 

15 An accomplished courtier, soldier, writer in " the spacious 
times of Great Elizabeth." He wrote his History while a prisoner 
of state in the Tower. His sentence of death was suspended, he 
commanded an expedition to South America, did things which caused 
him to be imprisoned again, and he was finally beheaded in execution 
of the original sentence. For the thrilling story see Hume. 



228 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

to treat for peace, it is more material to know the char- 
acter of allies, with whom you are about to enter into 
the closest connection of friendship, and for whose exer- 
tions you are about to pay. 

1 8 Now, Sir, what was the conduct of your own allies 
to Poland? Is there a single atrocity of the French in 
Italy, in Switzerland, in Egypt if you please, more un- 
principled and inhuman than that of Russia, Austria, 
and Prussia in Poland? What has there been in the 
conduct of the French to foreign powers ; what in the 
violation of solemn treaties ; what in the plunder, devas- 
tation, and dismemberment of unoffending countries ; 
what in the horrors and murders perpetrated upon the 
subdued victims of their rage in any district which they 
have overrun, worse than the conduct of those three 
great powers in the miserable, devoted, and trampled-on 
kingdom of Poland, and who have been, or are, our 
allies in this war for religion, social order, and the rights 
of nations ? 

19 " Oh ! but we regretted the partition of Poland ! " 16 
Yes, regretted ! you regretted the violence, and that is 
all you did. You united yourselves with the actors ; you, 
in fact, by your acquiescence, confirmed the atrocity. But 
they are your allies ; and though they overran and divided 
Poland, there was nothing, perhaps, in the manner of 
doing it which stamped it with peculiar infamy and dis- 
grace. The hero of Poland, 17 perhaps, was merciful and 
mild. He was " as much superior to Bonaparte in 
bravery, and in the discipline which he maintained, as 

16 A first, second, and third partition of Poland in 1772, 1793, 
and 1795. 

" And Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell." 

17 Frederick William II. of Prussia. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 229 

he was superior in virtue and humanity ! He was ani- 
mated by the purest principles of Christianity, and was 
restrained in his career by the benevolent precepts which 
it inculcates." Was he? Let unfortunate Warsaw, and 
the miserable inhabitants of the suburb of Praga in par- 
ticular, tell ! What do we understand to have been the 
conduct of this magnanimous hero, with whom, it seems, 
Bonaparte is not to be compared? He entered the sub- 
urb of Praga, 1S the most populous suburb of Warsaw ; 
and there he let his soldiery loose on the miserable, 
unarmed, and unresisting people ! Men, women, and 
children, nay, infants at the breast, were doomed to one 
indiscriminate massacre. Thousands of them were in- 
humanly, wantonly butchered ! And for what ? Because 
they had dared to join in a wish to ameliorate their own 
condition as a people, and to improve their constitution, 
which had been confessed by their own sovereign 19 to 
be in want of amendment. And such is the hero upon 
whom the cause of " religion and social order " is to 
repose ! And such is the man whom we praise for his 
discipline and his virtue, and whom we hold out as our 
boast and our dependence, while the conduct of Bona- 
parte unfits him to be even treated with as an enemy! 
20 But the behavior of the French toward Switzerland 
raises all the indignation of the right honorable gentle- 
man and inflames his eloquence. I admire the indigna- 
tion which he expresses (and I think he felt it) in speak- 



18 Nov. 4, 1794. 

" Oh, bloodiest picture in the book of Time, 
Sarmatia (Poland) fell, unwept, without a crime; 
Found not a generous friend, a pitying foe." 

— Campbell. 

19 Stanislaus II. 



230 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

ing of this country, so dear and so congenial to every 
man who loves the sacred name of liberty. He who 
loves liberty, says the right honorable gentleman, thought 
himself at home on the favored and happy mountains of 
Switzerland, where she seemed to have taken up her 
abode under a sort of implied compact, among all other 
states, that she should not be disturbed in this her chosen 
asylum. I admire the eloquence of the right honorable 
gentleman in speaking of this country of liberty and 
peace, to which every man would desire, once in his life 
at least, to make a pilgrimage. But who, let me ask him, 
first proposed to the Swiss people to depart from the 
neutrality which was their chief protection and to join 
the confederacy against the French? I aver that a noble 
relation of mine (Lord Robert Fitzgerald), then the min- 
ister of England to the Swiss Cantons, was instructed, 
in direct terms, to propose to the Swiss, by an official 
note, to break from the safe line they had laid down for 
themselves, and to tell them " in such a contest neutrality 
was criminal." I know that noble lord too well, though 
I have not been in habits of intercourse with him of late, 
from the employments in which he has been engaged, to 
suspect that he would have presented such a paper with- 
out the express instructions of his court, or that he would 
have gone beyond those instructions. 
21 But was it only to Switzerland that this sort of lan- 
guage was held? What was our language also to Tus- 
cany and to Genoa? An honorable gentleman (Mr. 
Canning) 20 has denied the authenticity 21 of a pretended 

20 As England's premier, he discussed the Mojgroe Doctrine with 
President Monroe's Secretary of State, favoring it as against the 
Holy Alliance. 

21 genuineness ? 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 231 

letter which has been circulated and ascribed to Lord 
Harvey." He says it is all a fable and a forgery. Be 
it so ; but is it also a fable that Lord Harvey did speak 
in terms to the grand duke 23 which he considered as 
offensive and insulting? I cannot tell, for I was not 
present. But was it not, and is it not believed? Is it a 
fable that Lord Harvey went into the closet of the grand 
duke, laid his watch upon the table, and demanded in a 
peremptory manner that he should, within a certain 
number of minutes, I think I have heard within a quarter 
of an hour, determine, aye or no, to dismiss the French 
minister, and order him out of his dominions ; with the 
menace that if he did not the English fleet should bom- 
bard Leghorn? Will the honorable gentleman deny this 
also? I certainly do not know it from my own knowl- 
edge ; but I know that persons of the first credit, then at 
Florence, have stated these facts, and that they never 
have been contradicted. It is true that upon the grand 
duke's complaint of this indignity Lord Harvey was re- 
called ; but was the principle recalled ? Was the mission 
recalled? Did not ministers persist in the demand which 
Lord Harvey had made, perhaps ungraciously? Was not 
the grand duke forced, in consequence, to dismiss the 
French minister? and did they not drive him to enter 
into an unwilling war with the republic? It is true that 
he afterward made his peace ; and that, having done so, 
he was treated severely and unjustly by the French. But 
what do I conclude from all this but that we have no 
right to be scrupulous, we who have violated the respect 
due to peaceable powers ourselves in this war, which, 



22 English minister to Tuscany. 

23 Of Tuscany. 



232 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

more than any other that ever afflicted human nature, has 
been distinguished by the greatest number of disgusting 
and outrageous insults to the smaller powers by the great. 

22 And I infer from this also that the instances not being 
confined to the French, but having been perpetrated by 
every one of the allies, and by England as much as by 
others, we have no right to refuse to treat with the 
French on this ground. Need I speak of your conduct 
to Genoa also ? Perhaps the note delivered by Mr. Drake 
was also a forgery. Perhaps the blockade 24 of the port 
never took place. It is impossible to deny the facts, 
which were so glaring at the time. It is a painful thing 
to me, Sir, to be obliged to go back to these unfortunate 
periods of the history of this war, and of the conduct of 
this country; but I am forced to the task by the use 
which has been made of the atrocities of the French as an 
argument against negotiation. 'I think I have said 
enough to prove that if the French have been guilty, we 
have not been innocent. Nothing but determined incre- 
dulity ° can make us deaf and blind to our own acts, 
when we are so ready to yield an assent to all the re- 
proaches which are thrown out on the enemy, and upon 
which reproaches we are gravely told to continue the war. 

23 " But France," it seems, " has roused all the nations 
of Europe against her;" and the long catalogue has 
been read to you to prove that she must have been atro- 
cious to provoke them all. Is it true, Sir, that she has 
roused them all? It does not say much for the address 
of his Majesty's ministers if this be the case. What, 
Sir, have all your negotiations, all your declamation, all 

24 By the Austrians, assisted by a British fleet. Massena de- 
fended the city with great ability, but was forced to evacuate it. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 233 

your money, been squandered in vain? Have you not 
succeeded in stirring the indignation and engaging the 
assistance of a single power? But you do yourselves 
injustice. I dare say the truth lies between you. Be- 
tween their crimes and your money the rage has been 
excited ; and full as much is due to your seductions as 
to her atrocities. My learned friend was correct, there- 
fore, in his argument ; for you cannot take both sides 
of the case : you cannot accuse them of having provoked 
all Europe, and at the same time claim the merit of hav- 
ing roused them to join you. 

24 No man regrets, Sir, more than I do, the enormities 
that France has committed ; but how do they bear upon 
the question as it now stands? Are we forever to 
deprive ourselves of the benefits of peace because France 
has perpetrated acts of injustice? Sir, we cannot acquit 
ourselves upon such ground. We have negotiated. With 
the knowledge of these acts of injustice and disorder, we 
have treated with them twice ; yet the right honorable 
gentleman cannot enter into negotiation with them now ; 
and it is worth while to attend to the reasons that he 
gives for refusing their offer. The revolution itself is 
no more an objection now than it was in 1796, when he 
did negotiate ; - 3 for the government of France at that 
time was surely as unstable as it is now. The crimes of 
the French, the instability of their government, did not 
then prevent him ; and why are they to prevent him now ? 
He negotiated with a government as unstable, and, baffled 
in that negotiation, he did not scruple to open another 
at Lisle in lygyp We have heard a very curious account 
of these negotiations this day, and, as the right honorable 

25 See notes to paragraphs 2 and 38. 



234 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

gentleman has emphatically told us, an " honest " account 
of them. He says he has no scruple in avowing that he 
apprehended danger from the success of his own efforts 
to procure a pacification, and that he was not displeased 
at its failure. He was sincere in his endeavors to treat, 
but he was not disappointed when they failed. I wish to 
understand the right honorable gentleman correctly. His 
declaration on the subject, then, I take to be this — that 
though sincere in his endeavors to procure peace in 1797, 
yet he apprehended greater danger from accomplishing 
his object than from the continuance of war; and that 
he felt this apprehension from the comparative views of 
the probable state of peace and war at that time. 
25 I have no hesitation in allowing the fact that a state 
of peace, immediately after a war of such violence, must, 
in some respects, be a state of insecurity; but does this 
not belong, in a certain degree, to all wars? And are 
we never to have peace, because that peace may be inse- 
cure? But there was something, it seems, so peculiar 
in this war and in the character and principles of the 
enemy, that the right honorable gentleman thought a 
peace in 1797 would be comparatively more dangerous 
than war. Why, then, did he treat? I beg the attention 
of the House to this — He treated, " because the un- 
equivocal sense of the people of England was declared to 
be in favor of a negotiation." The right honorable gen- 
tleman confesses the truth, then, that in 1797 the people 
were for peace. I thought so at the time; but you all 
recollect that, when I stated it in my place, it was denied. 
" True," they said, " }^ou have procured petitions ; but 
we have petitions, too : we all know in what strange ways 
petitions may be procured, and how little they deserve 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 235 

to be considered as the sense of the people." This was • 
their language at the time ; but now we find these peti- 
tions did speak the sense of the people, and that it was 
on this side of the House only that the sense of the 
people was spoken. The majority spoke a contrary lan- 
guage. It is acknowledged, then, that the unequivocal 
sense of the people of England may be spoken by the 
minority of this House, and that it is not always by the 
test of numbers that an honest decision is to be ascer- 
tained. This House decided against what the right hon- 
orable gentleman knew to be the sense of the country ; 
but he himself acted upon that sense against the vote of 
parliament. 

26 But, they say, " we have not refused all discussion." 
They have put a case. They have expressed a wish for 
the restoration of the House of Bourbon, and have de- 
clared that to be an event which would immediately 
remove every obstacle to negotiation. Sir, as to the resto- 
ration of the House of Bourbon, if it shall be the wish of 
the people of France, I for one shall be perfectly content 
to acquiesce. I think the people of France, as well as 
every other people, ought to have the government which 
they like best themselves ; and the form of that govern- 
ment, or the persons who hold it in their hands, should 
never be an obstacle with me to treat with the nation 
for peace, or to live with me in amity — but as an Eng- 
lishman, and actuated by English feelings, I surely can- 
not wish for the restoration of the House of Bourbon to 
the throne of France. I hope that I am not a man to 
bear heavily upon any unfortunate family. I feel for 
their situation, — I respect their distresses, — but, as a 
friend of England, I cannot wish for their restoration 



236 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

to the power which they abused. I cannot forget that 
the whole history of the century is little more than an 
account of the wars and the calamities arising from the 
restless ambition, the intrigues, and the perfidy of the 
House of Bourbon. 

27 I cannot discover, in any part of the labored defense 
which has been set up for not accepting the offer now 
made by France, any argument to satisfy my mind that 
ministers have not forfeited the test which they held out 
as infallible in 1797. An honorable gentleman thinks that 
Parliament should be eager only to approach the throne 
with declarations of their readiness to support his Maj- 
esty in the further prosecution of the war, without in- 
quiry; and he is quite delighted with an address, which 
he has found upon the journals, to King William, 26 in 
which they pledge themselves to support him in his efforts 
to resist the ambition of Louis XIV. He thinks it quite 
astonishing how much it is in point, and how perfectly 
it applies to the present occasion. One would have 
thought, Sir, that in order to prove the application, he 
would have shown that an offer had been respectfully 
made by the grand monarque to King William to treat, 
which he had peremptorily and in very irritating terms 
refused ; and that, upon this, the House of Commons had 
come forward, and with one voice declared their deter- 
mination to stand by him, with their lives and fortunes, 
in prosecuting the just and necessary war. Not a word 
of all this ; and yet the honorable gentleman finds it quite 
a parallel case, and an exact model for the House, on 
this day, to pursue. I really think, Sir, he might as well 
have taken any other address upon the Journals, upon 

26 William III. of England. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 237 

any other topic, as this address to King William. It 
would have been equally in point, and would have 
equally served to show the honorable gentleman's talents 
for reasoning. 

28 Sir, I cannot here overlook another instance of this 
honorable gentleman's candid style of debating, and of 
his respect for Parliament. He has found out, it seems, 
that in former periods of our history, and even in periods 
which have been denominated good times, intercepted 
letters have been published ; and he reads from the Ga- 
zette instances of such publication. Really, Sir, if the 
honorable gentleman had pursued the profession to which 
he turned his thoughts when younger, he would have 
learned that it was necessary to find cases a little more in 
point. And yet, full of his triumph on this notable dis- 
covery, he has chosen to indulge himself in speaking of a 
most respectable and a most honorable person as any that 
this country knows, and who is possessed of as sound an 
understanding as any man that I have the good fortune 
to be acquainted with, in terms the most offensive and 
disgusting, on account of words which he may be sup- 
posed to have said in another place. He has spoken of 
that noble person and of his intellect in terms which, 
were I disposed to retort, I might say show the honorable 
gentleman to be possessed of an intellect which would 
justify me in passing over in silence anything that comes 
from such a man. Sir, that noble person did not speak 
of the mere act of publishing the intercepted corre- 
spondence ; and the honorable gentleman's reference to 
the Gazettes of former periods is, therefore, not in point. 

29 The noble duke complained of the manner in which 
these intercepted letters had been published, not of the 



238 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

fact itself of their publication; for, in the introduction 
and notes to those letters, the ribaldry is such that they 
are not screened from the execration of every honorable 
mind even by their extreme stupidity. The honorable 
gentleman says that he must treat with indifference the 
intellect of a man who can ascribe the present scarcity 
of corn to the war. Sir, I think there is nothing either 
absurd or unjust in such an opinion. Does not the war, 
necessarily, by its magazines, and still more by its ex- 
peditions, increase consumption? But when we learn 
that corn is, at this very moment, sold in France for 
less than half the price which it bears here, is it not a 
fair thing to suppose that, but for the war and its prohi- 
bitions, a part of that grain would be brought to this 
country, on account of the high price which it would 
sell for, and that, consequently, our scarcity would be 
relieved from their abundance? I speak only upon re- 
port, of course; but I see that the price quoted in the 
French markets is less by one half than the prices in 
England. 

30 There was nothing, therefore, very absurd in what 
fell from my noble friend ; and I would really advise 
the honorable gentleman, when he speaks of per- 
sons distinguished for every virtue, to be a little more 
guarded in his language. I see no reason why he and 
his friends should not leave to persons in another place, 
holding the same opinions as themselves, the task of 
answering what may be thrown out there. Is not the 
phalanx sufficient? It is no great compliment to their 
talents, considering their number, that they cannot be left 
to the task of answering the few to whom they are 
opposed ; but perhaps the honorable gentleman has too 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 239 

little to do in this House, and is to be sent there himself. 
In truth, I see no reason why even he might not be sent, 
as well as some others who have been sent there. 

31 But, Sir, I meet the right honorable gentleman on his 
own ground. I say that you ought to treat on the same 
principle on which you treated in 1797, in order to gain 
the cordial co-operation of the people. " We want ex- 
perience and the evidence of facts." Can there be any 
evidence of facts equal to that of a frank, open, and 
candid negotiation? Let us see whether Bonaparte will 
display the same temper as his predecessors. If he shall 
do so, then you will confirm the people of England in 
their opinion of the necessity of continuing the war, and 
you will revive all the vigor which you roused in 1797. 
Or will you not do this until you have a reverse of for- 
tune? Will you never treat but when you are in a 
situation of distress, and when you have occasion to 
impose on the people? 

32 " But," you say, " we have not refused to treat." 
You have stated a case in which you will be ready im- 
mediately to enter into a negotiation — viz., the restora- 
tion of the House of Bourbon ; but you deny that this is 
a sine qua non; 21 and in your nonsensical language, 
which I do not understand, you talk of " limited possi- 
bilities " which may induce you to treat without the res- 
toration of the House of Bourbon. But do you state 
what they are? Now, Sir, I say that if you put one 
case, upon which you declare that you are willing to 
treat immediately, and say that there are other possible 
cases which may induce you to treat hereafter, without 
mentioning what these possible cases are, you do state a 

27 an absolute essential. 



240 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

sine qua non of immediate treaty. Suppose I have an 
estate to sell, and I say my demand is £1,000 for it — 
I will sell the estate immediately for that sum. To be 
sure, there may be other terms upon which I may be will- 
ing to part with it; but I say nothing of them. The 
£1,000 is the only condition that I state now. Will any 
gentleman say that I do not make the £1,000 the sine 
qua non of the immediate sale? Thus, you say, the res- 
toration of the princes is not the only possible ground ; 
but you give no other. This is your projet. 2S Do you 
demand a contre pro jet? Do you follow your own rule? 
Do you not do the thing of which you complained in the 
enemy? You seemed to be afraid of receiving another 
proposition ; and by confining yourselves to this one point 
you make it in fact, though not in terms, your sine qua 
non. 

33 But the right honorable gentleman, in his speech, 
does what the official note avoids — he finds there the 
convenient words, " experience and the evidence of 
facts ; " upon these he goes into detail ; and, in order to 
convince the House that new, evidence is required, he 
goes back to all the earliest acts and crimes of the revo- 
lution — to all the atrocities of all the governments that 
have passed away ; and he contends that he must have 
experience that these foul crimes are repented of, and 
that a purer and a better system is adopted in France, 
by which he may be sure that they shall be capable of 
maintaining the relations of peace and amity. Sir, these 
are not conciliatory words ; nor is this a practicable 
ground to gain experience. Does he think it possible 

28 In international law, a draft of a proposed treaty. A contre 
projet would be such a paper from the other side. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 241 

that evidence of a peaceable demeanor can be obtained 
in war? What does he mean to say to the French 
consul ? " Until you shall in war behave yourself in a 
peaceable manner, I will not treat with you." Is there 
not something extremely ridiculous in this? In duels, 
indeed, we have often heard of this kind of language. 
Two gentlemen go out and fight ; when, after discharging 
their pistols at one another, it is not an unusual thing 
for one of them to say to the other — " Now I am satis- 
fied — I see that you are a man of honor, and we are 
friends again." There is something, by-the-bye, ridicu- 
lous even in this ; but between nations it is more than 
ridiculous — it is criminal, It is a ground which no 
principle can justify, and which is as impracticable as 
it is impious. That two nations should be set on to beat 
one another into friendship is too abominable even for 
the fiction of romance ; but for a statesman seriously and 
gravely to lay it down as a system upon which he means 
to act is monstrous. What can we say of such a test 
as he means to put the French government to, but that 
it is hopeless? It is in the nature of war to inflame 
animosity — to exasperate, not to soothe, to widen, not 
to approximate. And so long as this is to be acted upon, 
it is vain to hope that we can have the evidence which 
we require. 

34 The right honorable gentleman, however, thinks other- 
wise; and he points out four distinct possible cases, 
besides the re-establishment of the Bourbon family, in 
which he would agree to treat with the French. 

1. "If Bonaparte shall conduct himself so as to con- 
vince him that he has abandoned the principles which 
were objectionable in his predecessors, and that he shall 
16 



242 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

be actuated by a more moderate system." I ask you, Sir, 
if this is likely to be ascertained in war ? It is the nature 
of war not to allay but to inflame the passions ; and it is 
not by the invective and abuse which have been thrown 
upon him and his government, nor by the continued irri- 
tations which war is sure to give, that the virtues of 
moderation and forbearance are to be nourished. 

2. " If, contrary to the expectations of ministers, the 
people of France shall show a disposition to acquiesce 
in the government of Bonaparte." Does the right hon- 
orable gentleman mean to say that because it is an usur^ 
pation on the part of the present chief, therefore the 
people are not likely to acquiesce in it ? I have not time, 
Sir, to discuss the question of this usurpation, or whether 
it is likely to be permanent; but I certainly have not so 
good an opinion of the French, or of any people, as to 
believe that it will be short-lived, merely because it was 
a usurpation, and because it is a system of military 
despotism. Cromwell was a usurper ; 29 and in many 
points there may be found a resemblance between him 
and the present chief consul of France. There is no 
doubt but that, on several occasions of his life, Crom- 
well's sincerity may be questioned, particularly in his 
self-denying ordinance — in his affected piety, and other 
things ; but would it not have been insanity in France 
and Spain to refuse to treat with him because he was 
a usurper ? No, Sir ; these are not the maxims by which 
governments are actuated. They do not inquire so much 
into the means by which power may have been acquired, 
as into the fact of where the power resides.. The people 
did acquiesce in the government of Cromwell ; 30 but it 

29 " The sagest of usurpers, Cromwell." — Byron. 
30 During the Commonwealth, 1653-1659. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 243 

may be said that the splendor of his talents, the vigor 
of his administration, the high tone with which he spoke 
to foreign nations, the success of his arms, and the char- 
acter which he gave to the English name, induced the 
nation to acquiesce in his usurpation ; and that we must 
not try Bonaparte by this example. Will it be said that 
Bonaparte is not a man of great abilities ? Will it be 
said that he has not, by his victories, thrown a splendor 
over even the violence of the revolution, and that he 
does not conciliate the French people by the high and 
lofty tone in which he speaks to foreign nations ? Are 
not the French, then, as likely as the English in the 
case of Cromwell to acquiesce in his government? If 
they should do so, the right honorable gentleman may find 
that this possible predicament may fail him. He may 
find that though one power may make war, it requires 
two to make peace. He may find that Bonaparte was as 
insincere as himself in the proposition which he made ; 
and in his turn he may come forward and say — " I have 
no occasion now for concealment. It is true that in the 
beginning of the year 1800 I offered to treat, not because 
I wished for peace, but because the people of France 
wished for it ; and besides, my old resources being ex- 
hausted, and there being no means of carrying on the 
war without a ' new and solid system of finance,' I pre- 
tended to treat, because I wished to procure the unani- 
mous assent of the French people to this new and solid 
system. Did you think I was in earnest? You were 
deceived. I now throw off the mask ; I have gained my 
point ; and I reject your offers with scorn." Is it not 
a very possible case that he may use this language? Is 
it not within the right honorable gentleman's " knowledge 
of human nature"? But even if this should not be the 



244 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

case, will not the very test which you require — the ac- 
quiescence of the people of France in his government — 
give him an advantage-ground in the negotiation which 
he does not possess now? Is it quite sure that when he 
finds himself safe in his seat he will treat on the same 
terms as now, and that you will get a better peace some 
time hence than you might reasonably hope to obtain at 
this moment? Will he not have one interest less than 
at present? And do you not overlook a favorable occa- 
sion for a chance which is extremely doubtful? These 
are the considerations which I would urge to his Maj- 
esty's ministers against the dangerous experiment of 
waiting for the acquiescence of the people of France. 

3. " If the allies of this country shall be less success- 
ful than they have every reason to expect they will be 
in stirring up the people of France against Bonaparte, 
and in the further prosecution of the war." And, 

4. "If the pressure of the war should be heavier 
upon us than it would be convenient for us to continue 
to bear." These are the other two possible emergencies 
in which the right honorable gentleman would treat even 
with Bonaparte. Sir, I have often blamed the right hon- 
orable gentleman for being disingenuous and insincere. 
On the present occasion I certainly cannot charge him 
with any such thing. He has made to-night a most 
honest confession. He is open and candid. He tells 
Bonaparte fairly what he has to expect. " I mean," 
says he, " to do everything in my power to raise up the 
people of France against you. I have engaged a number 
of allies, and our combined efforts shall be used to excite 
insurrection and civil war in France. I will strive to 
murder you, or to get you sent away. If I succeed, 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 245 

well; but if I fail, then I will treat with you. My 
resources being exhausted, even my solid system of fi- 
nance having failed to supply me with the means of 
keeping together my allies, and of feeding the discon- 
tents I have excited in France, then you may expect to 
see me renounce my high tone, my attachment to the 
House of Bourbon, my abhorrence of your crimes, my 
alarm at your principles ; for then I shall be ready to 
own that, on the balance and comparison of circum- 
stances, there will be less danger in concluding a peace 
than in the continuance of war ! " Is this a language for 
one state to hold to another? And what sort of peace 
does the right honorable gentleman expect to receive in 
that case? Does he think that Bonaparte would grant 
to baffled insolence, to humiliated pride, to disappoint- 
ment, and to imbecility the same terms which he would 
be ready to give now ? The right honorable gentleman 
cannot have forgotten what he said on another occasion — 

" Potuit quje plurima virtus 



Esse, fuit : toto certatum est corpore regni." 31 

He would then have to repeat his words, but with a dif- 
ferent application. He would have to say : All our efforts 
are vain — we have exhausted our strength — our de- 
signs are impracticable — and we must sue to you for 
peace. 

Sir, what is the question this night? We are called 



31 JEneid, XI, 312, 313. Latinus bewails his failing fortunes, 
and proposes to his Council terms of peace with the Trojans. He 
tells them : '* I blame no one. The highest type of valor was yours ; 
the war has been fought with the whole resources of the country." 
In Fox's eye George III. will be Latinus, and Bonaparte, /Eneas. 



246 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

upon to support ministers in refusing 32 a frank, candid, 
and respectful offer of negotiation, and to countenance 
them in continuing the war. Now, I would put the 
question in another way. Suppose ministers had been 
inclined to adopt the line of conduct which they pursued 
in 1796 and 1797, and that to-night, instead of a question 
on a war-address, it had been an address to his Majesty 
to thank him for accepting the overture, and for opening 
a negotiation to treat for peace : I ask the gentleman 
opposite — -I appeal to the whole 558 representatives of 
the people — 'to lay their hands upon their hearts, and 
to say whether they would not have cordially voted for 
such an address ? Would they, or would they not ? Yes, 
Sir, if the address had breathed a spirit of peace your 
benches would have resounded with rejoicings, and with 
praises of a measure that was likely to bring back the 
blessings of tranquillity. On the present occasion, then, 
I ask for the vote of none but those who, in the secret 
confession of their conscience, admit, at this instant 
while they hear me, that they would have cheerfully and 
heartily voted with the minister for an address directly 
the reverse of this. If every such gentleman were to 
vote with me, I should be this night in the greatest 
majority that ever I had the honor to vote with in this 
House. 

36 Sir, we have heard to-night a great many most acri- 
monious invectives against Bonaparte, against the whole 
course of his conduct, and against the unprincipled man- 



32 Parliament did refuse by an overwhelming majority. The 
answer to Bonaparte's proposal was written by Grenville, and was in 
Lord Rosebery's opinion a specimen of " fine untutored insolence." 
See Rosebery's Pitt, page 143. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 247 

ner in which he seized upon the reins of government. I 
will not make his defense — I think all this sort of in- 
vective, which is used only to inflame the passions of this 
House and of the country, exceeding ill-timed and very 
impolitic — but I say I will not make his defense. I 
am not sufficiently in possession of materials upon which 
to form an opinion on the character and conduct of this 
extraordinary man. Upon his arrival in France he 
found the government in a very unsettled state, and the 
whole affairs of the republic deranged, crippled, and in- 
volved. He thought it necessary to reform the govern- 
ment; and he did reform it, just in the way in which a 
military man may be expected to carry on a reform — he 
seized on the whole authority to himself. It will not 
be expected from me that I should either approve or 
apologize for such an act. I am certainly not for re- 
forming governments by such expedients ; but how 
this House can be so violently indignant at the idea of 
military despotism is, I own, a little singular, when I see 
the composure with which they can observe it nearer 
home ; nay, when I see them regard it as a frame of 
government most peculiarly suited to the exercise of free 
opinion on a subject the most important of any that can 
engage the attention of a people. Was it not the system 33 
that was so happily and so advantageously established 
of late all over Ireland ; and which, even now, the gov- 
ernment may, at its pleasure, proclaim over the whole of 
that kingdom? Are not the persons and property of the 
people left in many districts at this moment to the entire 
will of military commanders? And is not this held out 
as peculiarly proper and advantageous at a time when 

33 Martial law. 



248 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

the people of Ireland are free, and with unbiased judg- 
ment, to discuss the most interesting question of a leg- 
islative union ? 34 Notwithstanding the existence of mar- 
tial law, so far do we think Ireland from being enslaved, 
that we think it precisely the period and the circum- 
sltances under which she may best declare her free 
opinion ! Now really, Sir, I cannot think that gentlemen 
who talk in this way about Ireland can, with a good 
grace, rail at military despotism in France. 

37 But, it seems, " Bonaparte has broken his oaths. He 
has violated his oath of fidelity to the constitution of the 
year 3." Sir, il am not one of those who think that any 
such oaths ought ever to be exacted. They are seldom 
or ever of any effect; and I am not for sporting with a 
thing so sacred as an oath. I think it would be good to 
lay aside all such oaths. Who ever heard that, in revolu- 
tions, the oath of fidelity to the former government was 
ever regarded ; or even when violated, that it was im- 
puted to the persons as a crime? In times of revolution, 
men who take up arms are called rebels — if they fail, 
they are adjudged to be traitors. But who ever heard 
before of their being perjured? 

38 " Ah ! but Bonaparte has declared it as his opinion, 
that the two governments of Great Britain and of France 
cannot exist together. After the treaty of Campo 
Formio 35 he sent two confidential persons, Berthier and 

34 The Union of England and Ireland, July 2, 1800. 

35 Between Napoleon and Francis II. of Austria, 1797. Austria 
ceded her Belgian provinces to France, and engaged to use her influ- 
ence to have the Empire accept the principle of the Rhine boundary. 
In return, France ceded her the Republic of Venice. By this treaty 
Great Britain was left alone in her contest with France. Great 
Britain soon made overtures, negotiations were opened, ended in 
failure. Lord Malmsbury was given four and twenty hours to re- 
turn to his court to ask for the powers which he had declared he did 
not have. He went, but not to return. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 249 

Monge, to the Directory to say so in his name." Well, 
and what is there in this absurd and puerile assertion, if 
it was ever made? Has not the right honorable gentle- 
man, in this House, said the same thing? In this, at 
least, they resemble one another. They have both made 
use of this assertion ; and I believe that these two illus- 
trious persons are the only two on earth who think it. 

39 Are we still, as we happen to be successful on the 
one side or other, to bring up these impotent accusations, 
insults, and provocations, against each other ; and only 
when we are beaten and unfortunate to think of treating? 
Oh ! pity the condition of man, gracious God ! and save 
us from such a system of malevolence, in which all our 
old and venerated prejudices are to be done away, and 
by which we are to be taught to consider war as the 
natural state of man, and peace but as a dangerous and 
difficult extremity? 

40 Sir, this temper must be corrected. It is a diabolical 
spirit, and would lead to interminable war. Our history 
is full of instances that where we have overlooked a prof- 
fered occasion to treat, we have uniformly suffered by 
delay. At what time did we ever profit by obstinately 
persevering in war? 

41 " It is not the interest of Bonaparte," is seems, " sin- 
cerely to enter into a negotiation, or, if he should even 
make peace, sincerely to keep it." But how are we to 
decide upon his sincerity? By refusing to treat with 
him? Surely, if we mean to discover his sincerity, we 
ought to hear the propositions which he desires to make. 
" But peace would be unfriendly to his system of mili- 
tary despotism." Sir, I hear a great deal about the 
short-lived nature of military despotism. I wish the 
history of the world would bear gentlemen out in this 



250 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

description of military despotism. Was not the govern- 
ment erected by Augustus Caesar a military despotism? 
and yet it endured for 600 or 700 years. Military des- 
potism, unfortunately, is too likely in its nature to be 
permanent, and it is not true that it depends on the life 
of the first usurper. Though half the Roman emperors 
were murdered, yet the military despotism went on; and 
so it would be, I fear, in France. 

42 But, Sir, if we are to reason on the fact, I should 
think that it is the interest of Bonaparte to make peace. 
A lover of military glory, as that general must neces- 
sarily be, may he not think that his measure of glory is 
full — that it may be tarnished by a reverse of fortune, 
and can hardly be increased by any new laurels? He 
must feel that, in the situation to which he is now raised, 
he can no longer depend on his own fortune, his own 
genius, and his own talents, for a continuance of his 
success ; he must be under the necessity of employing 
other generals, whose misconduct or incapacity might 
endanger his power, or whose triumphs even might affect 
the interest which he holds in the opinion of the French. 
Peace, then, would secure to him what he has achieved, 
and fix the inconstancy of fortune. But this will not be 
his only motive. He must see that France also requires 
a respite — a breathing interval to recruit her wasted 
strength. To procure her this respite would be, perhaps, 
the attainment of more solid glory, as well as the means 
of acquiring more solid power, than anything which he 
can hope to gain from arms and from the proudest 
triumphs. May he not then be zealous to gain this fame, 
the only species of fame, perhaps, that is worth acquir- 
ing? Nay, granting that his soul may still burn with 
the thirst of military exploits, is it not likely that he 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 251 

is earnestly disposed to yield to the feelings of the 
French people, and to consolidate his power by consult- 
ing their interests ? I have a right to argue in this way, 
when suppositions of his insincerity are reasoned upon 
on the other side. 

43 Sir, these aspersions are, in truth, always idle, and 
even mischievous. I have been too long accustomed to 
hear imputations and calumnies thrown out upon great 
and honorable characters to be much influenced by them. 
My learned friend has paid this night a most just, de- 
served, and honorable tribute of applause to the memory 
of that great and unparalleled character who has been 
so recently lost to the world. I must, like him, beg 
leave to dwell a moment on the venerable George Wash- 
ington, though I know that it is impossible for me to 
bestow anything like adequate praise on a character 
which gave us, more than any other human being, the 
example of a perfect man ; yet, good, great, and unex- 
ampled as General Washington was, I can remember the 
time when he was not better spoken of in this House 
than Bonaparte is now. The right honorable gentleman 
who opened this debate (Mr. Dundas) 36 may remember 
in what terms of disdain, of virulence, and even of con- 
tempt, General Washington was spoken of by gentlemen 
on that side of the House. Does he not recollect with 
what marks of indignation any member was stigmatized 
as an enemy to his country who mentioned with common 
respect the name of General Washington? 37 If a nego- 



38 Why does Fox call Dundas to bear witness ? 
37 " Where can the wearied eye repose 
When gazing on the great ; 
Where neither guilty glory glows, 
Or perishable state?" 



252 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

tiation had then been proposed to be opened with that 
great man, what would have been said? "Would you 
treat with a rebel, a traitor ! What an example would 
you not give by such an act ! " I do not know whether 
the right honorable gentleman may not yet possess some 
of his old prejudices on the subject. I hope not. I hope 
by this time we are all convinced that a republican gov- 
ernment, like that of America, may exist without danger 
or injury to social order or to established monarchies. 
They have happily shown that they can maintain the 
relations of peace and amity with other states ; they have 
shown, too, that they are alive to the feelings of honor; 
but they do not lose sight of plain good sense and dis- 
cretion. They have not refused to negotiate with the 
French, and they have accordingly the hopes of a speedy 
termination of every difference. We cry up their con- 
duct, but we do not imitate it. 

44 My honorable friend (Mr. Whitbread) has been cen- 
sured for an opinion which he gave, and I think justly, 
that the change of property in France since the revolu- 
tion must form an almost insurmountable barrier to the 
return of the ancient proprietors. " No such thing," 
says the right honorable gentleman ; " nothing can be 
more easy. Property is depreciated to such a degree, 
that the purchasers would easily be brought to restore 
the estates." I very much differ with him in this idea. 
It is the character of every such convulsion as that which 



Yes, one ; the first, the last, the best, 
The Cincinnatus of the West, 
Whom envy dared not hate, 
Bequeathed the name of Washington 
To make men blush there is but one." 

— Byron. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 253 

has ravaged France, that an infinite and indescribable load 
of misery is inflicted upon private families. The heart 
sickens at the recital of the sorrows which it engenders. 
No revolution implied, though it may have occasioned, 
a total change of property. The restoration of the Bour- 
bons does imply it; and there is the difference. There 
is no doubt but that if the noble families had foreseen the 
duration and the extent of the evils which were to fall 
upon their heads, they would have taken a very different 
line of conduct. But they unfortunately flew from their 
country. 38 The king and his advisers sought foreign aid. 
A confederacy was formed to restore them by military 
force ; and as a means of resisting this combination, the 
estates of the fugitives were confiscated and sold. How- 
ever compassion may deplore the case, it cannot be said 
that the thing is unprecedented. The people have always 
resorted to such means of defense. Now the question 
is, how this property is to be got out of their hands? If 
it be true, as I have heard, that the purchasers of national 
and forfeited estates amount to 1,500,000 persons, I see 
no hopes of their being forced to deliver up their prop- 
erty ; nor do I even know that they ought. I question 
the policy, even if the thing were practicable; but I 
assert that such a body of new proprietors forms an in- 
surmountable barrier to the restoration of the ancient 
order of things. Never was a revolution consolidated 
by a pledge so strong. 

45 When the right honorable gentleman speaks of the 
extraordinary successes of the last campaign, he does 
not mention the horrors by which some of those successes 



38 Became " emigrants." 



254 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

were accompanied. Naples, for instance, has been, 
among others, what is called " delivered ; " and yet, if 
I am rightly informed, it has been stained and polluted 
by murders so ferocious, and by cruelties of every kind 
so abhorrent, that the heart shudders at the recital. It 
has been said, not only that the miserable victims of the 
rage and brutality of the fanatics were savagely mur- 
dered, but that, in many instances, their flesh was eaten 
and devoured by the cannibals who are the advocates and 
the instruments of social order! Nay, England is not 
totally exempt from reproach, if the rumors which are 
circulated be true. I will mention a fact to give minis- 
ters the opportunity, if it be false, of wiping away the 
stain that it must otherwise fix on the British name. It 
is said that a party of the republican inhabitants of 
Naples took shelter in the fortress of the Castel de Uova. 
They were besieged by a detachment from the royal army, 
to whom they refused to surrender ; but demanded that a 
British officer should be brought forward, and to him 
they capitulated. They made terms with him under the 
sanction of the British name. It was agreed that their 
persons and property should be safe, and that they should 
be conveyed to Toulon. They were accordingly put on 
board a vessel ; but before they sailed their property was 
confiscated, numbers of them taken out, thrown into dun- 
geons, and some of them, I understand, notwithstanding 
the British guarantee, actually executed. 
46 Where then, Sir, is this war, which on every side is 
pregnant with such horrors, to be carried? Where is it 
to stop ? Not till you establish the House of Bourbon ! 
And this you cherish the hope of doing, because you 
have had a successful campaign. Why, Sir, before this 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 255 

you have had a successful campaign. The situation of 
the allies, with all they have gained, is surely not to be 
compared now to what it was when you had taken Valen- 
ciennes, Quesnoy, Conde, etc., which induced some gen- 
tlemen in this House to prepare yourselves for a march 
to Paris. With all that you have gained, you surely will 
not say that the prospect is brighter now than it was then. 
What have you gained but the recovery of a part of 
what you before lost? One campaign is successful to 
you — another to them ; and in this way, animated by 
the vindictive passions of revenge, hatred, and rancor, 
which are infinitely more flagitious even than those of 
ambition and the thirst of power, you may go on for- 
ever; as, with such black incentives, I see no end to 
human misery. And all this without an intelligible 
motive, all this because you may gain a better peace a 
year or two hence ! So that we are called upon to go on 
merely as a speculation. We must keep Bonaparte for 
some time longer at war, as a state of probation. Gra- 
cious God, Sir, is war a state of probation? Is peace a 
rash system ? Is it dangerous for nations to live in amity 
with each other? Is your vigilance, your policy, your 
common powers of observation, to be extinguished by 
putting an end to the horrors of war? Cannot this state 
of probation be as well undergone without adding to the 
catalogue of human sufferings? " But we must pause! " 
What ! must the bowels of Great Britain be torn out — 
her best blood be spilt — her treasure wasted — that 
you may make an experiment? 

47 Put yourselves — oh ! that you would put yourselves 
— in the field of battle, and learn to judge of the sort 
of horrors that you excite. In former wars a man might 



256 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

at least have some feeling, some interest, that served to 
balance in his mind the impressions which a scene of 
carnage and of death must inflict. If a man had been 
present at the battle of Blenheim, 39 for instance, and had 
inquired the motive of the battle, there was not a soldier 
engaged who could not have satisfied his curiosity, and 
even perhaps allayed his feelings — they were fighting 
to repress the uncontrolled ambition of the grand mon- 
arque. But if a man were present now at a field of 
slaughter, and were to inquire for what they were fight- 
ing — " Fighting ! " would be the answer ; " they are not 
fighting, they are pausing." " Why is that man expir- 
ing? , Why is that other writhing with agony? What 
means this implacable fury ? " The answer must be, 
" You are quite wrong, Sir ; you deceive yourself — they 
are not fighting — do not disturb them — they are merely 
pausing ! — this man is not expiring with agony — that 
man is not dead — he is only pausing ! Lord help you, 
Sir ! they are not angry with one another ; they have now 
no cause of quarrel — but their country thinks that there 
should be a pause. All that you see, Sir, is nothing like 
fighting — there is no harm, nor cruelty, nor bloodshed 
in it whatever — it is nothing more than a political pause I 
— it is merely to try an experiment — to see whether 
Bonaparte will not behave himself better than hereto- 
fore; and in the meantime we have agreed to a pause, 
in pure friendship ! " And is this the way, Sir, that you 
are to show yourselves the advocates of order? You 
take up a system calculated to uncivilize the world, to 
destroy order, to trample on religion, to stifle in the 



39 In 1704, Marlborough, commanding the allied army of English, 
Dutch, and Austrians, beat the French and Bavarians. 



CHARLES JAMES FOX 257 

heart, not merely the generosity of noble sentiment, but 
the affections of social nature ; and in the prosecution of 
this system you spread terror and devastation all around 
you. 

48 Sir, I have done. I have told you my opinion. I 
think you ought to have given a civil, clear, and explicit 
answer to the overture which was fairly and handsomely 
made you. If you were desirous that the negotiation 
should have included all your allies, as the means of 
bringing about a general peace, you should have told 
Bonaparte so ; but I believe you were afraid of his agree- 
ing to the proposal. You took that method before. 
" Ay, but," you say, " the people were anxious for peace 
in 1797." I say they are friends to peace now; and I 
am confident that you will one day own it. Believe me, 
they are friends to peace ; although, by the laws which 
you have made restraining the expression of the sense 
of the people, public opinion cannot now be heard as 
loudly and unequivocally as heretofore. But I will not 
go into the internal state of this country. It is too afflict- 
ing to the heart to see the strides which have been made, 
by means of and under the miserable pretext of this war, 
against liberty of every kind, both of speech and of writ- 
ing ; and to observe in another kingdom 40 the rapid 
approaches to that military despotism which we affect 
to make an argument against peace. I know, Sir, that 
public opinion, if it could be collected, would be for 
peace, as much now as in 1797, and I know that it is 
only by public opinion — not by a sense of their duty — 
not by the inclination of their minds — that ministers 

40 Ireland. 



258 NAPOLEON'S OVERTURES FOR PEACE 

will be brought, if ever, to give us peace. I conclude, 
Sir, with repeating what I said before; I ask for no 
gentleman's vote who would have reprobated the com- 
pliance of ministers with the proposition of the French 
government; I ask for no gentleman's support to-night 
who would have voted against ministers, if they had 
come down and proposed to enter into a negotiation with 
the French ; but I have a right to ask — I know that, in 
honor, in consistency, in conscience, I have a right to 
expect the vote of every gentleman who would have 
voted with ministers in an address to his Majesty dia- 
metrically opposite to the motion of this night. 




ROBERT BROWNING. 



ROBERT BROWNING. 
1812-1889. 

" In the works of Browning and Tennyson, we see 
the breadth of culture, the spirit of inquiry, the wrestling 
of beliefs, and the introspective habits of the latter part 
of the nineteenth century." — Painter. 

Some of his principal works are Pauline, Paracelsus, 
Sordello, Pippa Passes, Saul, A Blot O' the Scutcheon, 
The Ring and the Book. 

A few of the oftenest read shorter poems are Rabbi 
Ben Ezra, By the Fireside, Andrea Del Sarto, My Last 
Duchess, The Flight of the Duchess, The Last Ride 
Together, Abt Voglcr, The Pied Piper of Ham^clin, How 
They Carried the Good News from Ghent to Aix. 

More has been written both for and against the 
style of Robert Browning than of any other author in 
poetry or prose of the nineteenth century. One need 
not wear the uniform of either force, but the reader 
who does not know what there is in some of Browning's 
minor poems to stir the nobler currents of his soul, to 
pitch his imagination to a higher flight, to place pictures 
of rare beauty before his eyes, is missing something sub- 
stantial as he goes along. 



261 



Saul' 



i. 

Said Abner, " At last thou 2 art come ! Ere I tell, ere 

thou speak, 
Kiss my cheek, wish me well ! " Then 1 2 wished it, and 

did kiss his cheek. 
And he, " Since the King, O my friend, for thy counte- 
nance sent, 
Neither drunken nor eaten have we; nor until from his 

tent 
Thou return with the joyful assurance the King liveth 

yet, s 

Shall our lip with the honey be bright, with the water 

be wet. 
For out of the black mid-tent's silence, a space of three 

days, 
Not a sound hath escaped to thy servants, of prayer nor 

of praise, 
To betoken that Saul and the Spirit have ended their 

strife, 
And that, faint in his triumph, the monarch sinks back 

upon life. I0 

ii. 

" Yet now my heart leaps, O beloved ! God's child with 

his dew 
On thy gracious gold hair, and those lilies still living 

and blue 



1 Read i Samuel 16:14-23; 18:10; and 19:9. 

2 David. 

263 



264 SAUL 

Just broken to twine round thy harpstrings, as if no wild 

heat 
Were now raging to torture the desert ! " 

in. 

Then I as was meet, 
Knelt down to the God of my fathers, and rose on my 

feet, IS 

And ran o'er the sand burnt to powder. The tent was 

unlooped ; 
I pulled up the spear that obstructed, and under I 

stooped ; 
Hands and knees on the slippery grass-patch, all withered 

and gone, 
That extends to the second enclosure, I groped my way on 
Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more 

I prayed, 
And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid 
But spoke, " Here is David, thy servant ! " And no voice 

replied. 
At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I 

descried 
A something more black than the blackness — the vast, 

the upright 
Main prop which sustains the pavilion : and slow into 

sight 2 5 

Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. 
Then a sunbeam, that burst through the tent-roof, showed 

Saul. 

IV. 

He stood as erect as that tent-prop, both arms stretched 
out wide 



ROBERT BROWNING 265 

On the great cross-support in the center, that goes to 

each side; 
He relaxed not a muscle, but hung there as, caught in 

his pangs 
And waiting his change, the king serpent all heavily 

hangs, 
Far away from his kind, in the pine, till deliverance come 
With the spring-time, — so agonized Saul, drear and 

stark, blind and dumb. 



Then I tuned my harp — took off the lilies 3 we twine 

round its chords 
Lest they snap 'neath the stress of the noontide — those 

sunbeams like swords ! 3S 

And I first played the tune all our sheep know, as, one 

after one, 
So docile they come to the pen-door till folding be done. 
They are white, and untorn by the bushes, for lo, they 

have fed 
Where the long grasses stifle the water within the 

stream's bed ; 
And now one after one seeks its lodging, as star follows 

star 40 

Into eve and the blue far above us, — so blue and so far ! 

VI. 

— Then the tune, for which quails on the cornland will 
each leave his mate 



Care for the meter, the cesura is after " lilies." 



266 SAUL 

To fly after the player; then, what makes the crickets 

elate 
Till for boldness they fight one another : and then, what 

has weight 
To set the quick jerboa a-musing outside his sand 

house — 4S 

There are none such as he for a wonder, half bird and 

half mouse ! 
God made all the creatures and gave them our love and 

our fear, 
To give sign, we and they are his children, one family 

here. 

VII. 

Then I played the help-tune of our reapers, their wine- 
song, when hand 
Grasps at hand, eye lights eye in good friendship, and 

great hearts expand . s° 

And grow one in the sense of this world's life. — And 

then, the last song, 
When the dead man is praised on his journey — " Bear,* 

bear him along, 
With his few faults shut up like dead flowerets ! Are 

balm seeds not here , 
To console us? The land has none left such as he on 

the bier. 
Oh, would we might keep thee, my brother ! " — And then, 

the glad chant S5 

Of the marriage, — first go the young maidens, next, she 

whom we vaunt 

4 Song begins. 



ROBERT BROWNING 267 

As the beauty, the pride of our dwelling. — And then, tho 

great march 
Wherein man runs to man to assist him and buttress an 

arch 
Naught can break ; who shall harm them, our friends ? — 

Then, the chorus intoned 
As the Levites go up to the altar in glory enthroned. 6o 
But I stopped here : for here in the darkness Saul groaned. 

VIII. 

And I paused, held my breath in such silence, and lis- 
tened apart ; 

And the tent shook, for mighty Saul shuddered : and 
sparkles 5 'gan dart 

From the jewels that woke in his turban at once with a 
start, 

All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at 
heart. 

So the head : but the body still moved not, still hung 
there erect. 

And I bent once again to my playing, pursued it un- 
checked, 

As I sang, — G 

IX. 

" Oh, our manhood's prime vigor ! No spirit feels waste, 
Not a muscle is stopped in its playing nor sinew unbraced. 
Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to 
rock, 



5 Perhaps the turban came into that ray of sunlight. 

Sings now with his playing, a glad song about life, an antidote 
to Saul's melancholy. Cails to witness father, mother, brethren, 
friends. 



268 SAUL 

The strong rending- of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool 

silver shock 
Of the plunge in a pool's living water, the hunt of the 

bear, 
And the sultriness showing the lion is couched in his lair. 
And the meal, the rich dates yellowed over with gold 

dust, divine, 
And the locust-flesh steeped in the pitcher, the full 

draught of wine, 75 

And the sleep in the dried river-channel where bulrushes 

tell 
That the water was wont to go warbling so softly and 

well. 
How good is man's life, the mere living! how fit to em- 
ploy 
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in joy ! 
Hast thou loved the white locks of thy father, whose 

sword thou didst guard 8o 

When he trusted thee forth with the armies, for glorious 

reward ? 
Didst thou see the thin hands of thy mother, held up as 

men sung 
The low song of the nearly departed, and hear her faint 

tongue, 
Joining in while it could to the witness, ' Let one more 

attest, 
I have lived, seen God's hand through a lifetime, and all 

was for best ! ' 8s 

Then they sung thro' their tears in strong triumph, not 

much, but the rest. 
And thy brothers, the help and the contest, the working 

whence grew 



ROBERT BROWNING 269 

Such result as, from seething grape-bundles, the spirit 
strained true : 

And the friends of thy boyhood — that boyhood of won- 
der and hope, 

Present promise and wealth of the future beyond the 
eye's scope, — 9 ° 

Till lo, thou art grown to a monarch ; a people is thine ; 

And all gifts, which the world offers singly, on one head 
combine ! 

On one head, all tne Deauty and strength, love and rage 
(like the throe 

That, a-work in the rock, helps its labor 7 and lets the 
gold go) 

High ambition and deeds which surpass it, fame crown- 
ing them, — all 

Brought to blaze on the head of one creature — King 
Saul ! 95 

X. 

And lo, with what leap of my spirit, — heart, hand, harp 

and voice, 
Each lifting Saul's name out of sorrow, each bidding 

rejoice 
Saul's fame in the light it was made for — as when, dare 

I say, 
The Lord's army, in rapture of service, strains through 

its array, I0 ° 

And upsoareth the cherubim-chariot — " Saul ! " cried I, 

and stopped, 
And waited the thing that should follow. Then Saul, 

who hung propped 



7 travail, brings forth the gold. 



270 SAUL 

By the tent's cross-support in the center, was struck by 

his name. 
Have ye seen when Spring's 8 arrowy summons goes 

right to the aim, 
And some mountain, the last to withstand her, that held 

(he alone, 10S 

While the vale laughed in freedom and flowers) on a 

broad bust of stone 
A year's snow bound about for a breastplate, — leaves 

grasp of the sheet? 
Fold on fold all at once it crowds thunderously down to 

his feet, 
And there fronts you, stark, black, but alive yet, your 

mountain of old, 
With his rents, the successive bequeathings of ages un- 
told— II0 
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow 

and scar 
Of his head thrust 'twixt you and the tempest — all hail, 

there they are ! 
— Now again to be softened with verdure, again hold 

the nest 
Of the dove, tempt the goat and its young to the green 

on his crest 
For their food in the ardors of summer. One long 

shudder thrilled IIS 

All the tent till the very air tingled, then sank and was 

stilled 



8 As Spring's arrows pierce the snow on the mountain, so Da- 
vid's song and call find a way into Saul's consciousness. He was 
" aware," but there was a wide interval between his dark despair 
and the sunshine of hope. 



ROBERT BROWNING 271 

At the King's self left standing before me, released and 

aware. 
What was gone, what remained? All to traverse 'twixt 

hope and despair, 
Death was past, life not come : so he waited. Awhile 

his right hand 
Held the brow, helped the eyes left too vacant forthwith 

to remand I20 

To their place what new objects should enter : 'twas Saul 

as before. 
I looked up and dared gaze at those eyes, nor was hurt 

any more 
Than by slow pallid sunsets in autumn, ye watch from 

the shore, 
At their ° sad level gaze o'er the ocean — a sun's slow 

decline 10 
Over hills which, resolved xl in stern silence, o'erlap and 

entwine, I25 

Base with base to knit strength more intensely : so, arm 

folded arm 
O'er the chest whose slow heavings subsided. 

XI. 

What spell or what charm, 
(For, awhile there was trouble within me), what next 

should I urge 
To sustain him where song had restored him? — Song 

filled to the verge 



Sunsets. 

w Object of watch. 

11 determined, fixed. 



272 SAUL 

His cup with the wine of this life, pressing all that it 

yields I3 ° 

Of mere fruitage, the strength and the beauty : beyond, 

on what fields, 
Glean a vintage more potent and perfect to brighten the 

eye 
And bring blood to the lip, and commend them the cup 

they put by? 
He saith, "It is good;" still he drinks not: he lets me 

praise life, 
Gives assent, yet would die for his own part. 135 

XII. 

Then fancies grew rife 
Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round 

me the sheep 
Fed in silence — above, the one eagle wheeled slow as 

in sleep ; , 

And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that 

might lie 
'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the 

hill and the sky : 
And I laughed — " Since my days are ordained to be 

passed with my flocks, I4 ° 

Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and 

the rocks, 
Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the 

show 
Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall 

know ! 
Schemes of life, its best rules and right uses, the courage 

that gains, 



ROBERT BROWNING 273 

And the prudence that keeps what men strive for." And 
now these old trains 14S 

Of vague thought came again ; I grew surer ; so, once 
more the string 

Of my harp made response to my spirit, as thus — 

XIII. 

" Yea, my King," 
I began — '"thou dost well in rejecting mere comforts 

that spring 
From the mere mortal life held in common by man and 

by brute: 
In our flesh grows the branch of this life, in our soul it 

bears fruit. IS ° 

Thou hast marked the slow rise of the tree, — how its 

stem trembled first 
Till it passed the kid's lip, the stag's antler ; then safely 

outburst 
The fan-branches all round ; and thou mindest when 

these, too, in turn, 
Broke-a-bloom and the palm-tree seemed perfect : yet 

more was to learn, 
E'en the good that comes in with the palm-fruit. Our 

dates shall we slight, I5S 

When their juice brings a cure for all sorrow? or care 

for the plight 
Of the palm's self whose slow growth produced them? 

Not so ! stem and branch 
Shall decay, nor be known 12 in their place, while the 

palm-wine shall stanch 



12 " And the places that know them now shall know them no 
more." 

18 



274 SAUL 

Every wound of man's spirit in winter. I pour thee such 

wine. 
Leave the flesh to the fate it was fit for ! the spirit be 

thine ! l6 ° 

By the spirit, when age shall o'ercome thee, thou still 

shalt enjoy 
More indeed, than at first when, inconscious, the life of 

a boy. 
Crush that life, and behold its wine running ! Each-deed 

thou hast done 
Dies, revives, goes to work in the world : until e'en as 

the sun 
Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, 

though tempests efface, l6s 

Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must every- 
where trace 
The results of his past summer-prime, — so, each ray of 

thy will, 
Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall 

thrill 
Thy whole people, the countless, with ardor, till they too 

give forth 
A like cheer to their sons, who in turn, fill the South and 

the North I7 ° 

With the radiance thy deed 13 was the germ of. Carouse 

in the past! 
But the license of age has its limit : thou diest at last. 
As the lion when age dims his eyeball, the rose at her 

height, 
So with man — so his power and his beauty forever take 

flight. 

13 Line 63. 



ROBERT BROWNING 



275 



No! 14 Again a long draught of my soul-wine! Look 

forth o'er the years ! : ?s 

Thou hast done now with eyes for the actual ; begin with 

the seer's ! 
Is Saul dead ? In the depth of the vale make his tomb — 

bid arise 
A gray mountain of marble heaped four-square, till, built 

to the skies, 
Let it mark where the great First King slumbers : whose 

fame would ye know? 
Up above see the rock's naked face, where the record 

shall go, l8 ° 

In great characters cut by the scribe, — Such 15 was Saul, 

so he did; 
With the sages directing the work, by the populace 

chid, — 
For not half, they affirm, is comprised there ! Which 

fault to amend, 
In the grove with his kind grows the cedar, whereon they 

shall spend 
(See, in tablets 'tis level before them) their praise, and 

record l85 

With the gold of the graver, Saul's story, — the states- 
man's great word 
Side by side with the poet's sweet comment. The river's 

a-wave 
With smooth paper-reeds grazing each other when 

prophet-winds rave: 
So the pen gives unborn generations their due and their 

part 



14 Dead, he yet lives. 

15 As recorded. 



276 SAUL 

In thy being ! Then, first of the mighty, thank God that 
thou art ! " 16 x 9° 

XIV. 

And behold while I sang 17 . . . but O Thou who didst 
grant me, that day, 

And, before it, not seldom hast granted thy help to essay, 18 

Carry on and complete an adventure, — my shield and my 
sword, 

In that act where my soul was thy servant, thy word was 
my word, — 

Still be with me, who then at the summit of human en- 
deavor J 9S 

And scaling the highest, man's thought could, gazed 
hopeless as ever 

On the new stretch of heaven above me — till, mighty to 
save 

Just one lift of thy hand cleared that distance — God's 
throne from man's grave! 

Let me tell out my tale to its ending — my voice to my 
heart 

Which can scarce dare believe in what marvels last night 
I took part, 200 

As this morning I gather the fragments, alone with my 
sheep, 

And still fear lest the terrible glory evanish like sleep ! 

For I wake in the gray dewy covert, while Hebron up- 
heaves 



' That thou livest and shalt live. 
The story rests while David prays. 
; In what previous " adventures " ? 



ROBERT BROWNING 277 

The dawn struggling with night on his shoulder, 19 and 

Kidron retrieves 20 
Slow the damage of yesterday's sunshine. 2 ° 5 

xv. 

I say then, — my song 

While I sang thus, assuring the monarch, and, ever more 
strong, 

Made a proffer of good to console him — he slowly re- 
sumed 

His old motions and habitudes kingly. The right hand 
replumed 

His black locks to their wonted composure, adjusted the 
swathes 

Of his turban, and see — the huge seat that his counte- 
nance bathes, 2I0 

He wipes off with the robe; and he girds now his loins 
as of yore, 

And feels slow for the armlets of price, with the clasp 
set before. 

He is Saul, ye remember in glory, ere error had bent 

The broad brow from the daily communion ; 21 and still, 
though much spent 22 

Be the life and the bearing that front you, the same, God 
did choose, 2IS 

To receive what 23 a man may waste, desecrate, never 
quite lose. 

So sank he along by the tent-prop till, stayed by the pile 



10 Day stands tiptoe on Hebron's shoulder. 

20 The brook slowly regains the loss from evaporation. 

"With God. 

22 weakened, unstrung. 

23 " Tis the divinity that stirs within." — Cato, Act V, Scene 1. 



278 SAUL 

Of his armor and war-cloak and garments, he leaned 

there awhile, 
And sat out my singing, — one arm round the tent-prop 

to raise 
His bent head, and the other hung slack — till I touched 

on the praise 220 

I foresaw from all men in all time, to the man patient 

there ; 
And thus ended, the harp falling forward. Then first I 

was 'ware 
That he sat, as I say, with my head just above his vast 

" knees 
Which were thrust out on each side around me, like oak 

roots which please 
To encircle a lamb when it slumbers. I looked up to 

know 225 

If the best I could do had brought solace : he spoke not, 

but slow 
Lifted up the hand slack at his side, till he laid it with 

care 
Soft and grave, but in mild settled will, on my brow : 

thro' my hair 
The large fingers were pushed, and he bent back my head, 

with kind power — 
All my face back, intent to peruse 2i it, as men do a 

flower. 23 ° 

Thus held he me there with his great eyes that scruti- 
nized mine — ■ 
And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was 

the sign? 

24 " He falls to such perusal of my face 
As he would draw it." 

— Hamlet, Act II, Scene 1, line go. 



ROBERT BROWNING 279 

I yearned — " Could I help thee, my father, inventing a 

bliss, 
I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and 

this; 
I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages 

hence, 235 

As this moment, — had love but the warrant, love's heart 

to dispense ! " 25 

XVI. 

Then the truth came upon me. No harp more 26 — no 
song more ! outbroke — 

XIII. 

" I have gone the whole round of creation : I saw and I 

spoke ; 
I, a work of God's hand for that purpose, 27 received in 

my brain 
And pronounced on the rest of his handwork — returned 

him again 24 ° 

His creation's 28 approval or censure : I spoke as I saw : 
I report, as a man may of God's work — all's love, yet 

all's law. 
Now I lay down the judgeship he lent me. Each faculty 

tasked 
To perceive him, has gained an abyss, where a dew drop 

was asked. 
Have I knowledge? confounded it shrivels at Wisdom 

laid bare. 24S 



If love had permission to pour out its heart. 

Ceased playing and singing. 

To make report. 

The objective possessive. 



280 SAUL. 

Have I forethought? how purblind, how blank, to the 
Infinite Care! 

Do I task any faculty highest, to imagine success? 

I but open my eyes, — and perfection, no more and no 
less, 

In the kind I imagined, full fronts me, and God is seen 
God 

In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the 
clod. 2 5° 

And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew 

(With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises 
it too) 

The submission of man's nothing-perfect to God's all- 
complete, 

As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to his feet. 

Yet with all this abounding experience, this deity 
known, 255 

I shall dare to discover some province, some gift of my 
own. 

There's a faculty pleasant to exercise, hard to hoodwink, 

I am fain to keep still in abeyance (I laugh as I think) 

Lest, insisting to claim and parade in it, wot ye, I worst 

E'en the Giver in one gift. — Behold, I could love if I 
durst ! 26 ° 

But I sink the pretension as fearing a man may o'ertake 

God's own speed in the one way of love: I abstain for 
love's sake. 29 

— What, my soul ? see thus far and no farther ? when 
doors great and small, 

Nine and ninety flew ope at our touch, should the hun- 
dredth appall? 



For fear I may surpass God ! But this mood instantly changes. 



ROBERT BROWNING 281 

In the least things have faith, yet distrust in the greatest 

of all? 26 s 

Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift, 
That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, 

the parts shift? 
Here, the creature surpass the Creator, — the end, what 

began ? 
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man, 
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet 

alone can? 27 ° 

Would it ever have entered my mind, the bare will, much 

less power, 
To bestow on this Saul what I sang of, the marvelous 

dower 
Of the life he was gifted and filled with? to make such a 

soul, 
Such a body, and then such an earth for insphering the 

whole ? 
And doth it not enter my mind 30 (as my warm tears 

attest) 27S 

These good things being given, to go on, and give one 

more, the best? 
Ay, to save and redeem and restore him, maintain at the 

height 
This perfection, — succeed, with life's dayspring, death's 

minute of night? 
Interpose at the difficult minute, snatch Saul the mistake, 
Saul the failure, the ruin he seems now, — and bid him 

awake 
From the dream, the probation, the prelude, to find him- 
self set 



™ It does; therefore, will God do it? 



282 SAUL 

Clear and safe in new light and new life, — a new har- 
mony yet 

To be run and continued, and ended — who knows ? — 
or endure ! 

The man taught enough by life's dream, of the rest to 
make sure ; 

By the pain-throb, triumphantly winning intensified 
bliss, 28 s 

And the next world's reward and repose, by the struggles 
in this. 

XVIII. 

" I believe it ! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who 

receive : 
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe. 
All's one gift : thou canst grant it moreover, as prompt 

to my prayer, 
As I breathe out this breath, as I open these arms to the 

air. 2 9° 

From thy will, stream the worlds, life and nature, thy 

dread Sabaoth. 
/ will ? — the mere atoms despise me ! 31 Why am I not 

loth 
To look that, even that in the face too ? Why is it I dare 
Think but lightly of such impuissance ? What stops my 

despair? 
This ; — 'tis not what man Does which exalts him, but 

what man would do ! 32 29S 

See the King — I would help him, but cannot, the wishes 

fall through. 



31 My " impuissance," weakness. 

82 Not my feebleness in action, but my strength of desire gives 
my measure, 



ROBERT BROWNING 283 

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to 

enrich, 
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would — know- 
ing which, 
I know that my service is perfect. 33 Oh, speak through 

me now ! 
Would I suffer for him that I love ? So wouldst thou 34 

— so wilt thou! 300 

So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost 

crown — 
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down 
One spot for the creature to stand in.! It is by no breath, 
Turn of eye, wave of hand, that salvation joins issue with 

death ! 
As thy love is discovered almighty, almighty be proved 3 ° 5 
Thy power, that exists with and for it, of being beloved ! 
He who did most, shall bear most ; the strongest shall 

stand the most weak. 
'Tis the weakness in strength, that I cry for ! my flesh, 

that I seek 
In the Godhead ! I seek and I find it. O Saul, it shall be 
A Face like my face that receives thee ; a Man like 

to me, 3I ° 

Thou shalt love and be loved by, forever: a Hand like 

this hand 
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee ! See the 

Christ stand ! " 

XIX. 

I know not too well how I found my way home in the 
night. 



u Unselfishness is the test. 
M The great discovery. 



284 SAUL 

There were witnesses, cohorts, about me, to left and 

to right, 
Angels, powers, the unuttered, unseen, the alive, the 

aware: 31s 

I repressed, I got through them as hardly, as strugglingly 

there, 
As a runner beset by the populace famished for news — 
Life or death. The whole earth was awakened, hell loosed 

with her crews ; 
And the stars of night beat with emotion, and tingled and 

shot 
Out in fire the strong pain of pent knowledge; but I 

fainted not, 32 ° 

For the Hand still impelled me at once and supported, 

suppressed 
All the tumult, and quenched it with quiet, and holy 

behest, 
Till the rapture was shut in itself, and the earth sank to 

rest. 
Anon at the dawn, all that trouble had withered from 

earth — 
Not so much, 35 but I saw it die out in the day's tender 

birth ; ^ 

In the gathered intensity brought to the gray of the hills ; 
In the shuddering forests' held breath; in the sudden 

wind-thrills ; 
In the startled wild beasts that bore oft, each with eye 

sidling still 
Though averted with wonder and dread ; in the birds stiff 

and chill 



" 5 A shade of it had lasted. 



ROBERT BROWNING 285 

That rose heavily, as I approached them, made stupid 

with awe : 330 

E'en the serpent that slid away silent, — he felt the new 

law. 
The same stared in the white humid faces upturned by 

the flowers ; 
The same worked in the heart of the cedar and moved 

the vine bowers: 
And the little brooks witnessing murmured, persistent 

and low, 
With their obstinate, all but hushed voices — " E'en so, 

it is so!" 33S 




CHARLES LAMB 



CHARLES LAMB. 

i775-i833- 

A biographical sketch of the inimitable Lamb is fur- 
nished us by his own artist hand ; " autobiographical," 
I should say ; and autobiography, as some brave punster 
once defined the word, is what " biography ought to be." 

Charles Lamb, born in the Inner Temple, 10th of 
February, 1775, educated in Christ's Hospital ; afterward 
a clerk in the Accountant's Office, East India House ; 
pensioned off from that service 1825, after 33 years' serv- 
ice ; is now a gentleman at large ; can remember few 
specialities of his life worth noting, except that he 
once caught a swallow flying {teste sua manu) ; below the 
middle stature ; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no 
Judaic tinge in his complexional religion ; stammers 
abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his 
occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism or a poor 
quibble, than in set and edifying speeches ; has conse- 
quently been libeled as a person always aiming at wit, 
which, as he told a dull fellow that charged him 
with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. 
A small eater, but not drinker ; confesses a par- 
tiality for the production of the juniper berry ; was a 
fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a vol- 
cano burnt out, emitting only now and then a casual puff. 
Has been guilty of obtruding upon the public a tale in 
prose, called Rosamund Gray; a dramatic sketch, en- 
titled John Woodvil; a Farewell Ode to Tobacco; with 
sundry other poems and light prose matter, collected 

287 



288 CHARLES LAMB 

in two slight crown octavos, and pompously christened 
His Works, though in fact they were his recreations, 
and his true works may be found on the shelves of Lead- 
enhall Street, filling some hundred folios. He is also the 
true " Elia," whose essays are extant in a little volume, 
published a year or two since, and rather better known 
from that name without a meaning, than from anything 
he has done or can hope to do in his own. He also 
was the first to draw attention to the old English drama- 
tists in a work called Specimens of Dramatic Writers 
Who Lived about the Time of Shakespeare, published 
about fifteen years since. In short, all his merits and 
demerits to set forth would take to the end of Mr. 
Upcott's book, and then not be told truly. 

He died 18 , much lamented. 

Witness his hand, 
April 1 8, 1827. Charles Lamb. 

In Coleridge's Table Talk is the prediction : " The 
place which Lamb holds and will continue to hold in 
English literature seems less liable to interruption than 
that of any other writer of our day." 

Coleridge's look ahead did not deceive him, 



The Old Benchers of the 
Inner Temple 

i I 1 was born, and passed the first seven years of my 
life, in the temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its 
fountain, its river, I had almost said, — for in those 
young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a 
stream that watered our pleasant places ? — these are of 
the oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses 
to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, 
than those of Spenser, 2 where he speaks of this spot : — 

There when they came, whereas those bricky towers, 
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride, 
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers, 
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide, 
Till they decayed through pride. 

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. 
What a transition for a countryman visiting London for 
the first time — the passing from the crowded Strand or 
Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent 
ample squares, its classic green recesses ! What a cheer- 
ful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which from three 
sides, overlooks the greater garden : that goodly pile 

Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight, 



1 We learn much about " St. Charles," as Thackeray called him, 
in this essay ; something, in every one. 

2 The author of The Faerie Queene, the greatest poetic allegory 
in English, lived in " the spacious times of great Elizabeth." 



290 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

confronting with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more 
fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the 
cheerful Crown-office Row (place of my kindly engen- 
dure ), right opposite the stately stream, which washes 
the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted 
waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham 
Naiads! a man would give something to have been born 
in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine 
Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have 
made to rise and fall, how many times ! to the astound- 
ment of young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not 
being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were 
almost tempted to hail the wondrous works as magic ! 
What an antique air had the now almost effaced sundials, 
with their moral inscriptions, seeming coevals with that 
Time which they measured, and to take their revelations 
of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspond- 
ence with the fountain of light ! How would the dark 
line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of child- 
hood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice 
as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrest of sleep ! 3 

Ah ! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand 

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived ! 

2 What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous em- 
bowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness 
of communication, compared with the simple altar-like 
structure, and silent heart-language of the old dial ! It 
stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is 
it almost everywhere vanished? If its business-use be 
superseded by more elaborate inventions, its moral uses, 

3 Stopping of consciousness by sleep. 



CHARLES LAMB 291 

its beauty, might have pleaded for its continuance. It 
spoke of moderate labors, of pleasures not protracted 
after sunset, of temperance, and good hours. It was the 
primitive clock, the horologe 4 of the first world. Adam 
could scarce have missed it in Paradise. It was the meas- 
ure appropriate for sweet plants and flowers to spring 
by, for the birds to apportion their silver warblings by, 
for flocks to pasture and be led to fold by. The shepherd 
" carved it out quaintly in the sun ; " and, turning philoso- 
pher by the very occupation, provided it with mottoes 
more touching than tombstones. It was a pretty device 
of the gardener, recorded by Marvell, 5 who, in the days 
of artificial gardening, made a dial out of herbs and 
flowers. I must quote his verses a little higher up, for 
they are full, as all his serious poetry was, of a witty 
delicacy. They will not come in awkwardly, I hope, in 
a talk of fountains, and sundials. He is speaking of 
sweet garden scenes : — 

What wondrous life is this I lead ! 
Ripe apples drop about my head. 
The luscious clusters of the vine 
Upon my mouth do crush their wine. 
The nectarine and curious peach 
Into my hands themselves do reach. 
Stumbling on melons, as I pass, 
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass. 
Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less 
Withdraws into its happiness. 
The mind, that ocean, where each kind 



4 " The horologe of Eternity 

Sayeth this incessantly, — 
' Forever — never.' " 

— Longfellow. 
8 An English poet — 1620-1678; at one time assistant Latin sec- 
retary to Milton. 



292 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

Does straight its own resemblance find; 

Yet it creates, transcending these, 

Far other worlds, and other seas, 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade. 

Here at the fountain's sliding foot, 

Or at some fruit tree's mossy root, 

Casting the body's vest aside, 

My soul into the boughs does glide; 

There, like a bird, it sits and sings, 

Then whets and claps its silver wings, 

And, till prepared for longer flight, 

Waves in its plumes the various light. 

How well the skilful gardener drew, 

Of flowers and herbs, this dial new, 

Where, from above, the milder sun 

Does through a fragrant zodiac run 

And, as it works, the industrious bee 

Computes its time as well as we. 

How could such sweet and wholesome hours 

Be reckon'd, but with herbs and flowers? 

3 The artificial fountains of the metropolis are, in like 
manner, fast vanishing. Most of them are dried up, or 
bricked over. Yet, where one is left, as in that little 
green nook behind the South-Sea House, 6 what a fresh- 
ness it gives to the dreary pile ! Four little winged mar- 
ble boys used to play their virgin fancies, spouting out 
ever fresh streams from their innocent-wanton lips in the 
square of Lincoln's-inn, when I was no bigger than they 
were figured. They are gone, and the spring choked up. 
The fashion, they tell me is gone by, and these things 
are esteemed childish. Why not then gratify children, 
by letting them stand? Lawyers, I suppose, were chil- 
dren once. They are awakening images to them at least. 



6 Lamb's essay, The South-Sea House, makes the reader think of 
Hawthorne's The Custom House. 



CHARLES LAMB 



293 



Why must everything smack of man and mannish? Is 
the world all grown up? Is childhood dead? Or 
is there not in the bosoms of the wisest and the best 
some of the child's heart left, to respond to its earliest 
enchantments? The figures were grotesque. Are the 
stiff-wigged living figures, that still flitter and chatter 
about that area, less Gothic in appearance? or is the 
splutter of their hot rhetoric one half so refreshing and 
innocent as the little cool playful streams those exploded 
cherubs uttered? 

4 They have lately gothicized 7 the entrance to the Inner 
Temple-hall, and the library front; to assimilate them, 
I suppose, to the body of the hall, which they do not 
at all resemble. What is become of the winged horse 
that stood over the former ? a stately arms ! and who has 
removed those frescoes of the Virtues, which Italianized 
the end of the Paper Buildings ? — my first hint of alle- 
gory ! They must account to me for these things, which 
I miss so greatly. 

5 The terrace is, indeed, left, which we used to call the 
parade; but the traces are passed away of the footsteps 
which made its pavement awful ! It is become common 
and profane. The old benchers had it almost sacred to 
themselves, in the forepart of the day at least. They 
might not be sided or jostled. Their air and dress as- 
serted the parade. You left wide spaces betwixt you, 
when you passed them. We walk on even terms with 

their successors. The roguish eye of J 11, ever ready 

to be delivered of a jest, almost invites a stranger to vie° 
a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst 



7 made Gothic in its style. 



294 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

have mated 8 Thomas Coventry ? — whose person was a 
quadrate, 9 his step massy and elephantine, his face 
square as the lion's, his gate peremptory and path-keep- 
ing, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the 
scarecrow of his inferiors, the browbeater of equals and 
superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he 
came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they 
would have shunned an Elisha bear. 10 His growl X1 was 
as thunder in their ears, whether he spake to them in 
mirth or in rebuke, his invitatory notes being, indeed, of 
all, the most repulsive and horrid. Clouds of snuff, ag- 
gravating the natural terrors of his speech, broke from 
each majestic nostril, darkening the air. He took it not 
by pinches, but a palmful at once, diving for it under 
the mighty flaps of his old-fashioned waistcoat pocket; 
his waistcoat red and angry, his coat dark rappee, tinc- 
tured by dye original, and by adjuncts, with buttons of 
obsolete gold. And so he paced the terrace. 
6 By his side a milder form was sometimes to be seen ; 
the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt. They were coevals, 
and had nothing but that and their benchership in com- 
mon. In politics Salt was a whig, and Coventry a stanch 
tory. Many a sarcastic growl did the latter cast out — 
for Coventry had a rough spinous 12 humor — at the po- 
litical confederates of his associate, which rebounded from 
the gentle bosom of the latter like cannon-balls from 
wool. You could not ruffle Samuel Salt. 



8 matched. 
four-square. 

10 One of the breed that wrought vengeance upon the mockers 
of Elijah. 

11 "A voice as deep as a thunder-growl." — Hawthorne. 

12 prickly. 



CHARLES LAMB 295 

7 S. had the reputation of being a very clever man, 
and of excellent discernment in the chamber practice of 
the law. I suspect his knowledge did not amount to 
much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, 
testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily 
handed it over with a few instructions to his man Lovel, 
who was a quick little fellow, and would dispatch it out 
of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which 
he had an uncommon share. It was incredible what re- 
pute for talents S. enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. 
He was a shy man ; a child might pose him in a minute, — 
indolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet 
men would give him credit for vast application, in spite 
of himself. He was not to be trusted with himself with 
impunity. He never dressed for a dinner party but he 
forgot his sword — they wore swords then — or some 
other necessary part of his equipage. Lovel had his eye 
upon him on all these occasions, and ordinarily gave 
him his cue. If there was anything which he could 
speak unseasonably, he was sure to do it. He was to 
dine at a relative's of the unfortunate Miss Blandy on 
the day of her execution ; — and L., who had a wary 
foresight of his probable hallucinations, before he set 
out, schooled him with great anxiety not in any possible 
manner to allude to her story that day. S. promised 
faithfully to observe the injunction. He had not been 
seated in the parlor, where the company was expecting 
the dinner summons, four minutes, when, a pause in 
the conversation ensuing, he got up, looked out of win- 
dow, and pulling down his ruffles — an ordinary motion 
with him — observed, " it was a gloomy day," and added, 
" Miss Blandy must be hanged by this time, I suppose." 



296 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

Instances of this sort were perpetual. Yet S. was 
thought by some of the greatest men of his time a fit 
person to be consulted, not alone in matters pertaining 
to the law,, but in the ordinary niceties and embarrass- 
ments of conduct — from force of manner entirely. He 
never laughed. He had the same good fortune among 
the female world, — was a known toast with the ladies, 
and one or two are said to have died for love of him — 
I suppose, because he never trifled or talked gallantry 
with them, or paid them, indeed, hardly common atten- 
tions. He had a fine face and person, but wanted, me 
thought, the spirit that should have shown them off with 
advantage to the women. His eye lacked luster. 13 
8 Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of 
that name. He passed his youth in contracted circum- 
stances, which gave him early those parsimonious habits 
which in after-life never forsook him ; so that, with one 
windfall 14 or another, about the time I knew him he 
was master of four or five hundred thousand pounds ; 
nor did he look, or walk, worth a moidore less. He lived 
in a gloomy house opposite the pump in Sergeant's-inn, 
Fleet Street. J., the counsel, is doing self-imposed pen- 
ance in it, for what reason I divine not, at this day. 
C. had an agreeable seat at North Cray, where he sel- 
dom spent above a day or two at a time in the summer ; 
but preferred, during the hot months, standing at his 
window in this damp, close, well-like mansion, to watch, 



13 " And then he drew a dial from his poke, 
And, looking on it with lack-luster eye, 
Says very wisely, ' It is ten o'clock.' " 

— As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7. 
14 bequest, something which came to him without his own exer- 
tion, as the wind brings down fruit and sometimes trees. 



CHARLES LAMB 297 

as he said, " the maids drawing water all day long." 
I suspect he had his within-door reasons for the prefer- 
ence. Hie currus et anna fuere. 15 He might think his 
treasures more safe. His house had the aspect of a 
strong-box. C. was a close hunks — a hoarder rather 
than a miser — or, if a miser, none of the mad Elwes 
breed, who have brought discredit upon a character, 
which cannot exist without certain admirable points of 
steadiness and unity of purpose. One may hate a true 
miser, but cannot, I suspect, so easily despise him. By 
taking care of the pence, he is often enabled to part with 
the pounds, upon a scale that leaves us careless generous 
fellows halting at an immeasurable distance behind. C. 
gave away £30,000 at once in his lifetime to a blind 
charity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, 
but he kept the table of a gentleman. He would know 
who came in and who went out of his house, but his 
kitchen chimney was never suffered to freeze. 16 
9 Salt was his opposite in this, as in all — never knew 
what he was worth in the world ; and having but a com- 
petency for his rank, which his indolent habits were little 
calculated to improve, might have suffered severely if he 
had not had honest people about him. Lovel took care 
of everything. He was at once his clerk, his good serv- 
ant, his dresser, his friend, his " flapper," his guide, stop- 
watch, auditor, treasurer. He did nothing without con- 
sulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting 
and fearing his admonishing. He put himself almost 
too much in his hands, had they not been the purest in 

10 " hie illius arma, 
Hie currus fuit." — Here her arms, here her chariot was. Lamb 
quotes with a free hand. 

16 grow cold. 



298 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

the world. He resigned his tide almost to respect as a 
master, if L. could ever have forgotten for a moment 
that he was a servant. 

10 I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible 
and losing honesty. 17 A good fellow withal, and " would 
strike." In the cause of the oppressed he never consid- 
ered inequalities, or calculated the number of his oppo- 
nents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a 
man of quality that had drawn upon him ; and pommeled 
him severely with the hilt of it. The swords-man had 
offered insult to a female — an occasion upon which no 
odds against him could have prevented the interference 
of Lovel. He would stand next day bareheaded to the 
same person, modestly to excuse his interference — for 
L. never forgot rank, where something better was not 
concerned. L. was the liveliest little fellow breath- 
ing, had a face as gay as Garrick's, 18 whom he was said 
greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him which con- 
firms it), possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — 
next to Swift and Prior 19 — molded heads in clay or 
plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural 
genius merely; turned cribbage boards, and such small 
cabinet toys, to perfection ; took a hand at quadrille or 
bowls with equal facility, made punch better than any 
man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips 
and conceits ; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries 



17 " Once in six or seven years our virtue becomes outrageous." 
— Macaulay's Moore's Life of Byron. 

18 A most noted actor of Shakespeare's dramas ; had been a 
pupil of Dr. Johnson. 

19 Poets of the time of Addison and Pope. S. now best known 
as the author of Gulliver; P. scarcely known at all, though 
Johnson says he " burst out from an obscure original to great emi- 
nence." Sic transit. 



CHARLES LAMB 299 

and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother 
of the angle moreover, and just such a free, hearty, hon- 
est companion as Mr. Izaac Walton 20 would have chosen 
to go a-fishing with. I saw him in his old age and the 
decay of his faculties, palsy-smitten, in the last sad stage 
of human weakness — "a remnant most forlorn of what 
he was," — yet even then his eye would light up upon the 
mention of his favorite Garrick. He was greatest, he 
would say, in Bayes — " was upon the stage nearly 
throughout the whole performance, and as busy as a bee." 
At intervals, too, he would speak of his former life, and 
how he came up a little boy from Lincoln to go to serv- 
ice, and how his mother cried at parting with him, and 
how he returned, after some few years' absence, in his 
smart new livery, to see her, and she blessed herself at the 
change, and could hardly be brought to believe that it 
was " her own bairn." And then, the excitement sub- 
siding, he would weep, till I have wished that sad second 
childhood might have a mother still to lay its head upon 
her lap. But the common mother of us all in no long 
time after received him gently into hers. 
11 With Coventry, and with Salt, in their walks upon 
the terrace, most commonly Peter Pierson would join to 
make up a third. They did not walk linked arm in arm 
in those days — " as now our stout triumvirs sweep the 
streets," — but generally with both hands folded behind 
them for state, or with one at least behind, the other 
carrying a cane. Pierson was a benevolent, but not a 
prepossessing, man. He had that in his face which you 
could not term unhappiness ; it rather implied an inca- 

20 The noted fisherman of literature ; author of The Gompleat 
Angler. 



3 oo ESSAYS OF ELI A 

pacity of being happy. His cheeks were colorless even 
to whiteness. His look was uninviting, resembling (but 
without his sourness) that of our great philanthropist. 21 
I know that he did good acts, but I could never make 
out what he was. Contemporary with these, but sub- 
ordinate, was Daines Barrington — another oddity — he 
walked burly and square — in imitation, I think, of Cov- 
entry — howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his pro- 
totype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the 
strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a 
brother a bishop. When the account of his year's treas- 
ureship came to be audited, the following singular charge 
was unanimously disallowed by the bench. " Item, dis- 
bursed Mr. Allen, the gardener, twenty shillings, for 
stuff to poison the sparrows, by my orders." 
12 Next to him was old Barton — a jolly negation, who 
took upon him the ordering of the bills of fare for the 
parliament chamber, where the benchers dine — answer- 
ing to the combination rooms at College — much to the 
easement of his less epicurean brethren. I know nothing 
more of him. Then Read, and Twopeny — Read, good- 
humored and personable — Twopeny, good-humored, but 
thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If 
T. was thin, Wharry was attenuated and fleeting. 
Many must remember him (for he was rather of later 
date) and his singular gait, which was performed by 
three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps 
were little efforts, like that of a child beginning to .walk; 
the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. 
Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I 

21 Dr. Johnson. 



CHARLES LAMB 301 

could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, 
nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than com- 
mon walking. The extreme tenuity of his frame, I sus- 
pect, set him upon it. It was a trial of poising. Two- 
peny would often rally him upon his leanness, and hail 
him as a brother Lusty ; but W. had no relish of a joke. 
His features were spiteful. I have heard that he would 
pinch his cat's ears extremely, when any thing had of- 
fended him. 

13 Jackson — the omniscient Jackson he was called — 
was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing 
more multifarious knowledge than any man of his time. 
He was the Friar Bacon ~~ of the less literate portion of 
the Temple. I remember a pleasant passage, of the cook 
applying to him, with much formality of apology, for 
instructions how to write down edge bone of beef in his 
bill of commons. 23 He was supposed to know, if any 
man in the world did. He decided the orthography to 
be — as I have given it — fortifying his authority with 
such anatomical reasons as dismissed the manciple (for 
the time) learned and happy. Some do spell it yet, per- 
versely, aitch bone, from a fanciful resemblance between 
its shape and that of the aspirate so denominated. I had 
almost forgotten Mingay with the iron hand — but he 
was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by 
some accident, and supplied it with a grappling hook, 
which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected 
the substitute, before I was old enough to reason whether 
it were artificial or not. I remember the astonishment 



22 1214-1292. See three pages of wonderful interest in Green's 
Shorter History of England. " First in the great roll of modern 
science (is) the name of Roger Bacon." 

20 bill of fare. 



3 o2 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

it raised in me. He was a blustering, loud-talking per- 
son ; and I reconciled the phenomenon to my ideas as an 
emblem of power — somewhat like the horns in the fore- 
head of Michael Angelo's Moses. 2 * Baron Maseres, who 
walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign 
of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections 
of the old benchers of the Inner Temple. 
14 Fantastic forms, whither are ye fled? Or, if the like 
of you exist, why exist they no more for me? Ye inex- 
plicable, half-understood appearances, why comes in 
reason to tear away the prenatural mist, bright or gloomy, 
that enshrouded you? Why make ye so sorry a figure 
in my relation, who made up to me, — to my childish eyes 

— the mythology of the Temple? In those days I saw 
Gods, as " old men covered with a mantle " walking upon 
the earth. Let the dreams of classic idolatry perish, — 
extinct be the fairies and fairy trumpery of legendary 
fabling, in the hearts of childhood, there will, forever, 
spring up a well of innocent or wholesome superstition, 
— the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital 

— from every-day forms educing the unknown and un- 
common. In that little Goshen 25 there will be light, 
when the grown world flounders about in the darkness 
of sense and materiality. While childhood, and while 
dreams, reducing 26 childhood, shall be left, imagination 
shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the 
earth. 



24 A great painting by Angelo. 

25 The part of Egypt wherein Pharaoh allowed Jacob and his 
descendants to settle. 

20 bringing back childhood, making it " a visible thing on which 
the sun is shining." — Wordsworth. 



A Quakers' Meeting 



i Reader, would'st thou know what true peace and quiet 
mean ; would'st thou find a refuge from the noises and 
clamors of the multitude ; would'st thou enjoy at once 
solitude and society ; would'st thou possess the depth of 
thine own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from 
the consolatory faces of thy species ; would'st thou be 
alone, and yet accompanied ; solitary, yet not desolate ; 
singular, yet not without some to keep thee in counte- 
nance ; a unit in aggregate ; a simple in composite : — 
come with me into a Quakers' Meeting. 

2 Dost thou love silence deep as that " before the winds 
were made " ? go not out into the wilderness ; descend 
not into the profundities of the earth ; shut not up the 
casements ; nor pour wax into the little cells of thy ears, 
with little- faith'd self-mistrusting Ulysses. 1 — Retire with 
me into a Quakers' Meeting. 

3 For a man to refrain even from good words, and to 
hold his peace, it is commendable ; but for a multitude, 
it is great mastery. 

4 What is the stillness of the desert, compared with this 
place ? what the uncommunicating muteness of fishes ? — 
here the goddess reigns and revels. — " Boreas, and Cesias, 
and Argestes loud," do not with their inter-confounding 
uproars more augment the brawl — nor the waves of 
the blown Baltic with their clubbed sounds 2 — than 
their opposite ( Silence her sacred self ) is multiplied 

] Ulysses so secured the ears of his sailors against the allure- 
ment of the Sirens, but had himself tied to a mast. 
8 Where many silences are " clubbed," or united. 

3°3 



3 o 4 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

and rendered more intense by numbers, and by sympathy. 
She too hath her deeps, that call unto deeps. Negation 
itself hath a positive more and less ; and closed eyes 
would seem to obscure the great obscurity of midnight. 

5 There are wounds which an imperfect solitude cannot 
heal. By imperfect I mean that which a man enjoyeth 
by himself. The perfect is that which he can sometimes 
attain in crowds, but nowhere so absolutely as in a 
Quakers' Meeting. Those first hermits did certainly un- 
derstand this principle, when they retired into Egyptian 
solitudes, not singly, but in shoals, to enjoy one another's 
want of conversation. The Carthusian 3 is bound to his 
brethren by this agreeing spirit of incommunicativeness. 
In secular occasions, what so pleasant as to be reading 
a book through a long winter evening, with a friend 
sitting by — say, a wife — he, or she, too (if that be 
probable), reading another, without interruption, or oral 
communication ? — can there be no sympathy without the 
gabble of words? — ■ away with this inhuman, shy, single, 
shade- and cavern-haunting solitariness. Give me, Master 
Zimmermann, 4 a sympathetic solitude. 

6 To pace alone in the cloisters, or side aisles of some 
cathedral, time-stricken ; 

Or under hanging mountains, 
Or by the fall of fountains; 

is but a vulgar luxury, compared with that which those 
enjoy who come together for the purposes of more com- 
plete, abstracted solitude. This is the loneliness "to be 
felt." — The Abbey Church of Westminster hath nothing 
so solemn, so spirit-soothing, as the naked walls and 

3 A member of an old religious order in France, at Chartreuse. 

4 Author of a book on Solitude. 



CHARLES LAMB 305 

benches of a Quakers' Meeting. Here are no tombs, no 
inscriptions, — 

Sands, ignoble things, 
Dropt from the ruined sides of kings : 

but here is something which throws Antiquity herself 
into the foreground — Silence — eldest of things — lan- 
guage of old Night — primitive Discourse — to which 
the insolvent decays of moldering grandeur have but 
arrived by a violent, and, as we may say, unnatural pro- 
gression. 

How reverend is the view of these hushed heads, 
Looking tranquillity ! 5 

7 Nothing-plotting, nought-caballing, unmischievous 
synod ! convocation without intrigue ! parliament without 
debate ! what a lesson dost thou read to council, and to 
consistory ! — if my pen treat of you lightly — as haply 
it will wander — yet my spirit hath gravely felt the wis- 
dom of your custom, when sitting among you in deepest 
peace, which some out-welling tears would rather con- 
firm than disturb, I have reverted to the times of your be- 
ginnings, and the sowings of the seed by Fox and Dewes- 
bury. c I have witnessed that which brought before my 
eyes your heroic tranquillity, inflexible to the rude jests 
and serious violences of the insolent soldiery, republican 
or royalist, sent to molest you, — for ye sat betwixt the 
fires of two persecutions, the outcast and offscouring of 
church and presbytery. I have seen the reeling sea-ruffian, 
who had wandered into your receptacle with the avowed 



8 " How reverend is the face of this tall pile, 

Looking tranquillity." — Congreve. 
Eminent early Quakers. Fox is said to have been the first of 
his sect to be called " Quaker." 



3 o6 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

intention of disturbing your quiet, from the very spirit 
of the place receive in a moment a new heart, and pres- 
ently sit among ye as a lamb amidst lambs. And I re- 
member Penn before his accusers, and Fox in the bail- 
dock, where he was lifted up in spirit, as he tells us, and 
" the Judge and the Jury became as dead men under his 
feet." 

8 Reader, if you are not acquainted with it, I would rec- 
ommend to you, above all church-narratives, to read 
Sewel's " History of the Quakers." It is in folio, and 
is the abstract of the Journals of Fox and the primitive 
Friends. It is far more edifying and affecting than any- 
thing you will read of Wesley and his colleagues. Here 
is nothing to stagger you, nothing to make you mistrust, 
no suspicion of alloy, no drop or dreg° of the worldly 
or ambitious spirit. You will here read the true story 
of that much-injured, ridiculed man (who perhaps hath 
been a byword in your mouth) — James Nay lor: what 
dreadful sufferings, with what patience, he endured, even 
to the boring through of his, tongue with redhot irons, 
without a murmur; and with what strength of mind, 
when the delusion he had fallen into, which they stigma- 
tized for blasphemy, had given way to clearer thoughts, 
he could renounce his error, in a strain of the beautiful- 
est humility, yet keep his first grounds, and be a Quaker 
still ! — so different from the practice of your common 
converts from enthusiasm, who, when they apostatize," 
apostatise all, and think they can never get far enough 
from the society of their former errors, even to the re- 
nunciation of some saving truths, with which they had 
been mingled, not implicated. 

9 Get the Writings of John Woolman by heart ; and love 
the early Quakers. 



CHARLES LAMB 307 

How far the followers of these good men in our days 
have kept to the primitive spirit, or in what proportion 
they have substituted formality for it, the Judge of Spirits 
can alone determine. I have seen faces in their assem- 
blies, upon which the dove sat visibly brooding. Others 
again I have watched, when my thoughts should have 
been better engaged, in which I could possibly detect 
nothing but a blank inanity. But quiet was in all, 
and the disposition to unanimity and the absence of 
the fierce controversial workings. If the spiritual pre- 
tensions of the Quakers have abated, at least they 
make few pretenses. Hypocrites they certainly are not 
in their preaching. It is seldom indeed that you shall see 
one get up amongst them to hold forth. Only now and 
then a trembling, female, generally ancient voice is heard 
— you cannot guess from what part of the meeting it 
proceeds — with a low, buzzing, musical sound, laying 
out a few words which " she thought might suit the con- 
dition of some present," with a quaking difference, which 
leaves no possibility of supposing that anything of female 
vanity was mixed up, where the tones were so full of 
tenderness, and a restraining modesty. The men, for 
what I have observed, speak seldomer. 
10 Once only, and it was some years ago, I witnessed a 
sample of the old Foxian orgasm. 7 It was a man of giant 
stature, who, as Wordsworth phrases it, might have 
danced " from head to foot equipt in iron mail." His 
frame was of iron too. But he was malleable. I saw him 
shake all over with the spirit — I dare not say of delu- 
sion. The strivings of the outer man were unutterable — 
he seemed not to speak, but to be spoken from. I saw 



' excitement, as in the days of Fox. 



3 o8 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

the strong man bowed down, and his knees to fail — his 
joints all seemed loosening — it was a figure to set off 
against Paul Preaching — the words he uttered were few, 
and sound — he was evidently resisting his will — keep- 
ing down his own word-wisdom with more mighty effort, 
than the world's orators strain for theirs. " He had 
been a wit in his youth," he told us, with expressions of 
a sober remorse. And it was not till long after the im- 
pression had begun to wear away, that I was enabled, 
with something like a smile, to recall the striking incon- 
gruity of the confession — understanding the term in its 
worldly acceptation — with the frame and physiognomy 
of the person before me. His brow would have scared 
away the Levites — the Jocos Risus-que 8 — faster than 
the Loves fled the face of Dis 9 at Enna. By wit, even 
in his youth, I will be sworn, he understood something 
far within the limit of an allowable liberty. 
ii More frequently the Meeting is broken up without 
a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. 
You go away with a sermon not made with hands. You 
have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius ; 10 or as 
in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild 
creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely 
lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness. 
O when the spirit is sore fretted, even tired to sickness 
of the janglings, nonsense-noises of the world, what a 
balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself, for a 
quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, 
among the gentle Quakers ! 



8 Jokers and laughers. 
8 Pluto. 
10 Builder of the first temple at Delphi. 



CHARLES LAMB 309 

Their garb and stillness conjoined, present a uniform- 
ity, tranquil and herd-like — as in the pasture — "forty 
feeding like one." 

The very garments of a Quaker seem incapable of 
receiving a soil ; and cleanliness in them to be something 
more than the absence of its contrary. Every Quakeress 
is a lily; and when they come up in bands to their 
Whitsun "-conferences, whitening the easterly streets of 
the metropolis, from all parts of the United Kingdom, 
they show like troops of the Shining Ones. 



11 Seventh Sunday after Easter. 



Grace before Meat 



i The custom of saying grace at meals had, probably, 
its origin in the early times of the world, and the hunter 
state of men, when dinners were precarious things, and 
a full meal was something more than a common blessing ! 
when a bellyfull was a windfall, and looked like a special 
providence. In the shouts and triumphal songs with 
which, after a season of sharp abstinence, a lucky booty 
of deer's or goat's flesh would naturally be ushered home, 
existed, perhaps, the germ of the modern grace. It is 
not otherwise easy to be understood, why the blessing of 
food — the act of eating — should have had a particular 
expression of thanksgiving annexed to it, distinct from 
that implied and silent gratitude with which we are ex- 
pected to enter upon the enjoyment of the many other 
various gifts and good things of existence. 
2 I own that I am disposed to say grace upon twenty 
other occasions in the course of the day besides my din- 
ner. I want a form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, 
for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a 
solved problem. Why have none for books, those spirit- 
ual repasts — a grace before Milton — a grace before 
Shakespeare — a devotional exercise proper to be said 
before reading the Fairy Queen? — but the received rit- 
ual having prescribed these forms to the solitary cere- 
mony of manducation, I shall confine my observations to 
the experience which I have had of the grace, properly 
so called; commending my new scheme for extension to 
a niche in th2 grand philosophical, poetical, and per- 
310 



CHARLES LAMB 311 

chance in part heretical, liturgy, now compiling by my 
friend Homo Humanus, 1 for the use of a certain snug 
congregation of Utopian 2 Rabelaisian 3 Christians, no 
matter where assembled. 

3 The form, then, of the benediction before eating has its 
beauty at a poor man's table, or at the simple and unpro- 
vocative repast of children. It is here that the grace 
becomes exceedingly graceful. The indigent man, who 
hardly knows whether he shall have a meal the next day 
or not, sits down to his fare with a present sense of the 
blessing, which can be but feebly acted by the rich, into 
whose minds the conception of wanting a dinner could 
never, but by some extreme theory, have entered. The 
proper end of food — the animal sustenance — is barely 
contemplated by them. The poor man's bread is his 
daily bread, literally his bread for the day. Their courses 
are perennial. 

4 Again the plainest diet seems the fittest to be preceded 
by the grace. That which is least stimulative to appetite, 
leaves the mind most free for foreign considerations. A 
man may feel thankful, heartily thankful, over a dish of 
plain mutton with turnips, and have leisure to reflect upon 
the ordinance and institution of eating; when he shall 
confess a perturbation of mind, inconsistent with the pur- 
poses of the grace, at the presence of venison or turtle. 
When I have sat (a rants hospes), 4 at rich men's tables, 
with the savory soup and messes steaming up the nostrils, 
and moistening the lips of the guests with desire and a 



1 Literally, a human man. 

2 A name — Utopia — invented by Sir Thomas More, meaning 
nowhere. 

3 A French satirist Rabelais (Rah'bla) of four centuries ago. 
* An unfrequent guest. 



3 i2 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

distracted choice, I have felt the introduction of that 
ceremony to be unseasonable. With the ravenous or- 
gasm 5 upon you, it seems impertinent to interpose a 
religious sentiment. It is a confusion of purpose to mut- 
ter out praises from a mouth that waters. The heats of 
epicurism ° put out the gentle flame of devotion. The in- 
cense which rises round is pagan, and the bellygod inter- 
cepts it for his own. The very excess of the provision 
beyond the needs, takes away all sense of proportion 
between the end and means. The giver is veiled by his 
gifts. You are startled at the injustice of returning 
thanks — for what ? — for having too much, while so 
many starve. It is to praise the Gods amiss. 

5 I have observed this awkwardness felt, scarce con- 
sciously perhaps, by the good man who says the grace. 
I have seen it in clergymen and others, — a sort of shame, 
— a sense of the co-presence of circumstances which un- 
hallow the blessing. After a devotional tone put on for 
a few seconds, how rapidly the speaker will fall into his 
common voice ! helping himself or his neighbor, as if to 
get rid of some uneasy sensation of hypocrisy. Not that 
the good man was a hypocrite, or was not most conscien- 
tious in the discharge of the duty; but he felt in his 
inmost mind the incompatibility of the scene and the 
viands before him with the exercise of a calm and rational 
gratitude. 

6 I hear somebody exclaim, — Would you have Christians 
sit down at table, like hogs to their troughs, without 
remembering the Giver ? — no, — I would have them sit 
down as Christians, remembering the Giver, and less like 
hogs. Or if their appetites must run riot, and they must 

5 hunger. 



CHARLES LAMB 313 

pamper themselves with delicacies for which east and 
west are ransacked, I would have them postpone their 
benediction to a fitter season, when appetite is laid ; when 
the still small voice can be heard, and the reason of the 
grace returns — with temperate diet and restricted dishes. 
Gluttony and surfeiting are no proper occasions for 
thanksgiving. When Jeshurun 6 waxed fat, we read that 
he kicked. Virgil knew the harpy-nature better, when he 
put into the mouth of Celaeno 7 anything but a blessing. 
We may be gratefully sensible of the deliciousness of 
some kinds of food beyond others, though that is a 
meaner and inferior gratitude; but the proper object of 
the grace is sustenance, not relishes ; daily bread, not deli- 
cacies ; the means of life, and not the means of pamper- 
ing the carcass. With what frame or composure, I 
wonder, can a city chaplain pronounce his benediction 
at some great Hall-feast, when he knows that his last 
concluding pious word — and that, in all probability, the 
sacred name which he preaches — is but the signal for 
so many impatient harpies to commence their foul orgies, 
with as little sense of true thankfulness (which is tem- 
perance) as those Virgilian fowl! It is well if the good 
man himself does not feel his devotions a little clouded, 
those foggy- sensuous steams mingling with and pollut- 
ing the pure altar sacrifice. 
7 The severest satire upon full tables and surfeits is the 



"Adapted from Deuteronomy 32:15.' 

7 One of Virgil's harpies, " Virgilian fowl," who foretells dire 
hunger to be endured by the Trojans. Spenser alludes to the 
story : — 

" Whiles sad Celeno, sitting on a clifte, 
A song of bale and bitter sorrow sings, 
That heart of flint asonder could have rifte." 



3 i4 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

banquet which Satan, in the Paradise Regained, pro- 
vides for a temptation in the wilderness : — 

A table richly spread in regal mode 
With dishes piled, and meats of noblest sort 
And savor ; beasts of chase, or fowl of game, 
In pastry built, or from the spit, or boiled, 
Gris-amber-steamed ; all fish from sea or shore, 
Freshet or purling brook, for which was drained 
Pontus, and Lucrine bay, and Afric coast. 

8 The Tempter, I warrant you, thought these cates° 
would go down without the recommendatory preface of 
a benediction. They are like to be short graces where 
the devil plays the host. I am afraid the poet wants his 
usual decorum in this place. Was he thinking of the old 
Roman luxury, or of a gaudy day at Cambridge? This 
was a temptation fitter for a Heliogabalus. 8 The whole 
banquet is too civic and culinary, and the accompani- 
ments altogether a profanation of that deep, abstracted 
holy scene. The mighty artillery of sauces, which the 
cook-fiend conjures up, is out of proportion to the simple 
wants and plain hunger of the guest. He that disturbed 
him in his dreams, from his dreams might have been 
taught better. To the temperate fantasies of the famished 
Son of God, what sort of feasts presented themselves? — 
He dreamed indeed, 

As appetite is wont to dream, 
Of meats and drinks, nature's refreshment sweet. 

But what meats? — 

Him thought, 9 he by the' brook of Cherith stood, 
And saw the ravens with their horny beaks 

8 A royal Roman gourmand. 

9 An idiom like methought — it thought, or seemed, to him. 

" Great pity was it, as it thought hem alle." 

- — The Knight es Tale. 



CHARLES LAMB 315 

Food to Elijah bringing even and morn; 

Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought : 

He saw the prophet also how he fled 

Into the desert, and how there he slept 

Under a juniper; then how awaked 

He found his supper on the coals prepared, 

And by the angel was bid rise and eat, 

And ate the second time after repose, 

The strength whereof sufficed him forty days; 

Sometimes, that with Elijah he partook, 

Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse. 10 

Nothing in Milton is finelier fancied than these temperate 
dreams of the divine Hungerer. To which of these two 
visionary banquets, think you, would the introduction of 
what is called the grace have been the most fitting and 
pertinent ? 

9 Theoretically I am no enemy to graces ; but practically 
I own that (before meat especially) they seem to involve 
something awkward and unseasonable. Our appetites, of 
one or another kind, are excellent spurs to our reason, 
which might otherwise but feebly set about the great ends 
of preserving and continuing the species. They are fit 
blessings to be contemplated at a distance with a becom- 
ing gratitude; but the moment of appetite (the judicious 
reader will apprehend me) is, perhaps, the least fit season 
for that exercise. The Quakers, who go about their busi- 
ness of every description with more calmness than we, 
have more title to the use of these benedictory prefaces. 
I have always admired their silent grace, and the more be- 
cause I have observed their applications to the meat and 
drink following to be less passionate and sensual than 

10 " Hast thou 

At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse? 

Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust?" — Emerson. 



3 i6 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

ours. They are neither gluttons nor wine-bibbers as a 
people. They eat, as a horse bolts his chopped hay, with 
indifference, calmness, and cleanly circumstances. They 
neither grease nor slop themselves. When I see a citizen 
in his bib and tucker, I cannot imagine it a surplice. 1X 
10 I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not in- 
different to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of 
deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispas- 
sionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting 
not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in 
higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who pro- 
fesses to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical 

character in the tastes of food. C holds that a man 

cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. 
I am not certain but he is right. With the decay of my 
first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for 
those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have 
lost their gust° with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which 
still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient 
and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to 
come home at the dinner hour, for instance, expecting 
some savory mess, and to find one quite tasteless and 
sapidless. Butter ill melted — that commonest of kitchen 
failures — ■ puts me beside my tenor. The author of The 
Ramble}' used to make inarticulate animal noises over 
a favorite food. 12 Was this the music quite proper to be 
preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have 
done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the 
blessing might be contemplated with less perturbation? 

11 and therefore a token of some religious rite. 

12 JV[acaulay says that Dr. Johnson ate as it was natural that a 
man should eat who, during a great part of his life, had passed the 
morning in doubt whether he should have food for the afternoon. 



CHARLES LAMB 317 

I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin 
face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity 
and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, 
have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should 
be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while 
he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not 
secretly kissing his hand to some great fish — his Dagon 
— with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen 
before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to 
the banquets of angels and children ; to the roots and 
severer repasts of the Chartreuse ; 13 to the slender, but 
not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and 
humble man ; but at the heaped-up boards of the pam- 
pered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, 
less timid and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the 
noise of those better befitting organs would be which chil- 
dren hear tales of, at Hog's Norton. We sit too long at 
our meals, or are too curious in the study of them or too 
disordered in our application to them, or engross too 
great a portion of these good things (which should be 
common) to our share, to be able with any grace to say 
grace. To be thankful for what we grasp exceeding 
our proportion, is to add hypocrisy to injustice. A lurk- 
ing sense of this truth is what makes the performance 
of this duty so cold and spiritless a service at most tables. 
In houses where the grace is as indispensable as the nap- 
kin, who has not seen that never settled question arise, 
as to who shall say it? while the good man of the house 
and the visitor clergyman, or some other guest, belike 
of next authority, from years or gravity, shall be bandy- 
ing about the office between them as a matter of compli- 

13 A monastery, 



3 i8 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

ment, each of them not unwilling to shift the awkward 
burden of an equivocal duty from his own shoulders? 
ii I once drank tea in company with two Methodist 
divines of different persuasions, whom it was my for- 
tune to introduce to each other for the first time that 
evening. Before the first cup was handed round, one of 
these reverend gentlemen put it to the other, with all due 
solemnity, whether he chose to say anything. It seems it 
is the custom of some sectaries to put up a short prayer 
before this meal also. His reverend brother did not at 
first quite apprehend him, but upon an explanation, with 
little less importance he made answer that it was not a 
custom known in his church ; in which courteous evasion 
the other acquiescing for good manners' sake, or in com- 
pliance with a weak brother, the supplementary or tea- 
grace was waived altogether. With what spirit might 
not Lucian 14 have painted two priests of his religion 
playing into each other's hands the compliment of per- 
forming or omitting a sacrifice, — the hungry God mean- 
time, doubtful of his incense, with expectant nostrils 
hovering over the two flamens ; ° and (as between two 
stools) going away in the end without his supper. 
12 A short form upon these occasions is felt to want rev- 
erence ; a long one, I am afraid, cannot escape the charge 
of impertinence. I do not quite approve of the epigram- 
matic conciseness with which that equivocal wag (but my 
pleasant school- fellow) C. V. L., when importuned for 
a grace, used to inquire, first slyly leering down the table, 
"Is there no clergyman here?" — significantly adding, 
" Thank G — ." Nor do I think our old form at school 
quite pertinent, where we were used to preface our bald 

14 A Roman satirist. 



CHARLES LAMB 319 

bread-and-cheese-suppers with a preamble, connecting 
with that humble blessing a recognition of benefits the 
most awful and overwhelming to the imagination which 
religion has to offer. N011 tunc Mis crat locus. 15 I re- 
member we were put to it to reconcile the phrase " good 
creatures," upon which the blessing rested, with the fare 
set before us, wilfully understanding that expression in 
a low and animal sense, — till some one recalled a legend, 
which told how, in the golden days of Christ's, 10 the 
young Hospitallers were wont to have smoke- joints of 
roast meat upon their nightly boards, till some pious 
benefactor, commiserating the decencies, rather than the 
palates, of the children, commuted our flesh for garments, 
and gave us — horrcsco rcfcrens 17 — trousers instead of 
mutton. 



15 It was not the time for such things. 

16 Christ's Hospital. 

17 Recalling it, I shudder. 



Dream Children; A Revery 



Children love to listen to stories about their elders, 
when they were children ; to stretch their imagination to 
the conception of a traditionary great-uncle, or gran- 
dame, whom they never saw. It was in this spirit that 
my little ones crept about me the other evening to hear 
about their great-grandmother Field, who lived in a great 
house in Norfolk (a hundred times bigger than that in 
which they and papa lived) which had been the scene — 
so at least it was generally believed in that part of the 
country — of the tragic incidents which they had lately 
become familiar with from the ballad of the Children in 
the Wood. Certain it is that the whole story of the 
children and their cruel uncle was to be seen fairly carved 
out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall, the 
whole story down to the Robin Redbreast ; till a foolish 
rich person pulled it down to set up a marble one of 
modern invention in its stead, with no story upon it. 
Here Alice put out one of her dear mother's looks too 
tender to be called upbraiding. Then I went on to say, 
how religious and how good their great-grandmother Field 
was, how beloved and respected by everybody, though 
she was not indeed the mistress of this great house, but 
had only the charge of it (and yet in some respects she 
might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to 
her by the owner, who preferred living in a newer and 
more fashionable mansion which he had purchased some- 
where in the adjoining county; but still she lived in it 
in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up 
320 



CHARLES LAMB 321 

the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived, 
which afterward came to decay, and was nearly pulled 
down, and all its old ornaments stripped and carried away 
to the owner's other house, where they were set up, and 
looked as awkward as if some one were to carry away 
the old tombs they had seen lately at the Abbey, and stick 
them up in Lady C.'s tawdry gilt drawing-room. Here 
John smiled, as much as to say, " that would be foolish 
indeed. And then I told how, when she came to die, her 
funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and 
some of the gentry too, of the neighborhood for many 
miles round, to show their respect for her memory, be- 
cause she had been such a good and religious woman ; so 
good indeed that she knew all the Psaltery by heart, ay, 
and a great part of the Testament besides. Here little 
Alice spread her hands. Then I told what a tall, up- 
right, graceful person their great-grandmother Field 
once was ; and how in her youth she was esteemed the 
best dancer, — here Alice's little right foot played an in- 
voluntary movement, till, upon my looking grave, it de- 
sisted, — the best dancer, I was saying, in the country, 
till a cruel disease, called a cancer, came, and bowed her 
down with pain ; but it could never bend her good spirits, 
or make them stoop, but they were still upright, because 
she was so good and religious. Then I told how she was 
used to sleep by herself in a lone chamber of the great 
lone house ; and how she believed that an apparition of 
two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and 
down the great staircase near where she slept, but she 
said " those innocents would do her no harm ; " and how 
frightened I used to be, though in those days I had my 
maid to sleep with me, because I was never half so good 



322 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

or religious as she, — and yet I never saw the infants. 
Here John expanded all his eyebrows and tried to look 
courageous. Then I told how good she was to all her 
grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holi- 
days, where I in particular used to spend many hours by 
myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve 
Caesars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old 
marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned 
into marble with them; how I never could be tired with 
roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty 
rooms, with, their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, 
and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed 
out, — sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, 
which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then 
a solitary gardening man would cross me, — and how the 
nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my 
ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden 
fruit, unless now and then, — and because I had more 
pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-look- 
ing yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, 
and fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at, 

— or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine 
garden smells around me, — or basking in the orangery, 
till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with 
the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth, — or 
in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish- 
pond at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a 
great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in 
silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent riskings; 

— I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than 
in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, 
and such-like common baits of children. Here John slyly 
deposited back upon the plate a bunch of grapes, which, 



CHARLES LAMB 323 

not unobserved by Alice, he had meditated dividing with 
her, and both seemed willing to relinquish them for the 
present as irrelevant. Then, in somewhat a more height- 
ened tone, I told how, though their great-grandmother 
Field loved all her grandchildren, yet in an especial man- 
ner she might be said to love their uncle, John L , 

because he was so handsome and spirited a youth, and 
a king to the rest of us ; and, instead of moping about in 
solitary corners, like some of us, he would mount the 
most mettlesome horse he could get, when but an imp 
no bigger than themselves, and make it carry him half 
over the country in a morning, and join the hunters when 
there were any out, — and yet he loved the old great house 
and gardens too, but had too much spirit to be always 
pent up within their boundaries, — and how their uncle 
grew up to man's estate as brave as he was handsome, 
to the admiration of everybody, but of their great-grand- 
mother Field most especially ; and how he used to carry 
me upon his back when I was a lame-footed boy — for 
he was a good bit older than me — many a mile when 
I could not walk for pain ; — and how in after-life he 
became lame- footed too, and I did not always (I fear) 
make allowances enough for him when he was impatient 
and in pain, nor remember sufficiently how considerate 
he had been to me when I was lame-footed ; and how 
when he died, though he had not been dead an hour, it 
seemed as if he had died a great while ago, such a dis- 
tance there is betwixt life and death ; and how I bore 
his death, as I thought pretty well at first, but afterward 
it haunted and haunted me ; and though I did not cry or 
take it to heart as some do, and as I think he would have 
done if I had died, yet I missed him all day long, and 
knew not till then how much I had loved him. I missed 



324 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

his kindness, and I missed his crossness, and wished him 
to be alive again, to be quarreling with him (for we quar- 
reled sometimes), rather than not have him again, 
and was as uneasy without him, as he their poor 
uncle must have been when the doctor took off his 
limb. Here the children fell a-crying, and asked if their 
little mourning which they had on was not for Uncle 
John, and they looked up, and prayed me not to go on 
about their uncle, but to tell them some stories about 
their pretty dead mother. Then I told how, for seven 
long years, in hope sometimes, sometimes in despair, yet 
persisting ever, I courted the fair Alice W — n; and, as 
much as children could understand, I explained to them 
what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant in maidens, 
— when suddenly turning to Alice, the soul of the first 
Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re- 
presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood 
before me, or whose that bright hair was ; and while I 
stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter 
to my view, receding, and still receding, till nothing at 
last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost 
distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed 
upon me the effects of speech : " We are not of Alice 
nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of 
Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than 
nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have 
been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe mil- 
lions of ages before we have existence, and a name ; " 

and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly 

seated in my bachelor armchair, where I had fallen asleep, 
with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side, — but 
John L.( or James Elia) was gone forever. 



New Year's Eve. 



i Every man hath two birthdays : two at least in every 
year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as 
it affects his mortal duration. The one is that which in 
an especial manner he termeth his. In the gradual desue- 
tude of old observances, this custom of solemnizing our 
proper birthday hath nearly passed away, or is left to 
children, who reflect nothing at all about the matter, nor 
understanding anything in it beyond cake and orange. 
But the birth of a New Year is of an interest too wide 
to be pretermitted by king or cobbler. No one ever re- 
garded the first of January with indifference. It is that 
from which all date their time and count upon what is 
left. It is the nativity of our common Adam. 

2 Of all sound of all bells (bells, the music nighest bor- 
dering upon heaven) — most solemn and touching is the 
peal which rings out the Old Year. I never hear it with- 
out a gathering-up of my mind to a concentration of all 
the images that have been diffused over the past twelve- 
month; all I have done or suffered, performed or neg- 
lected — in that regretted time. I begin to know its 
worth, as when a person dies. It takes a personal color; 
nor was it a poetical flight in a contemporary, when he 
exclaimed, — 

I saw the skirts of the departing year. 

3 It is no more than what in sober sadness every one of 
us seems to be conscious of, in that awful leave-taking. 
I am sure I felt it, and all felt it with me, last night ; 
though some of my companions affected rather to mani- 

325 



326 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

fest an exhilaration at the birth of the coming year, 
than any tender regrets for the decease of its predecessor. 
But I am none of those who — 

Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest. 

4 I am naturally, beforehand, shy of novelties, new 
books, new faces, new years — from some mental twist 
which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective. I 
have almost ceased to hope; and am sanguine only in 
the prospects of other (former) years. I plunge into 
foregone visions and conclusions. I encounter pellmell 
with past disappointments. I am armor-proof against 
old discouragements. I forgive, or overcome in fancy, 
old adversaries. I play over again for love, as the game- 
sters phrase it, games for which I once paid so dear. I 
would scarce now have any of those untoward accidents 
and events of my life reversed. I would no more alter 
them than the incidents of some well-contrived novel. 
Methinks it is better that I should have pined away seven 
of my goldenest years, when I was thrall to the fair 
hair, the fairer eyes of Alice W — n, than that so passion- 
ate a love-adventure should be lost. It was better that 
our family should have missed that legacy, which old 
Dorrell cheated us of, than that I should have at this 
moment two thousand pounds in banco, and be without 
the idea of that specious old rogue. 

5 In a degree beneath manhood, it is my infirmity to look 
back upon those early days. Do I advance a paradox, 
when I say, that, skipping over the intervention of forty 
years, a man may have leave to love himself, without 
the imputation of self-love. 

6 If I know aught of myself, no one whose mind is in- 
trospective — and mine is painfully so — can have a less 



CHARLES LAMB 327 

respect for his present identity, than I have for the man 
Elia. I know him to be light, and vain, and humorsome ; 
a notorious . . . ; addicted to ... ; averse from counsel, 
neither taking it nor offering it ; — . . . besides ; a stam- 
mering buffoon ; what you will ; lay it on, and spare not ; 
I subscribe to it all, and much more than thou canst be 
willing to lay at his door — but for the child Elia, that 
" other me," there, in the background — I must take leave 
to cherish the remembrance of that young master — with 
as little reference, I protest, to this stupid changeling of 
five-and forty, as if it had been a child of some other 
house, and not of my parents. I can cry over its patient 
smallpox at five, and rougher medicaments. I can lay 
its poor fevered head upon the sick pillow at Christ's, and 
wake with it in surprise at the gentle posture of maternal 
tenderness hanging over it, that unknown had watched 
its sleep. I know how it shrank from any the least color 
of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed ! 
— Thou art sophisticated 1 — I know how honest, how 
courageous (for a weakling) it was — how religious, 
how imaginative, how hopeful ! From what have I not 
fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself, — and 
not some dissembling ° guardian, presenting a false iden- 
tity, to give the rule to my unpracticed steps, and regulate 
the tone of my moral being ! 

7 That I am fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sym- 
pathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of 
some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another 
cause : simply, that being without wife or family, I have 



1 " Ha ! here's three on's are sophisticated! 
Thou art the thing itself." 

— Lear, Act III, Scene 4. 



328 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and 
having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back 
upon memory, and adopt my own early idea, as my heir 
and favorite? If these speculations seem fantastical to 
thee, reader — (a busy man, perchance), if I tread out of 
the way of thy sympathy and am singularly conceited 
only, I retire impenetrable to ridicule, under the phantom 
cloud of Elia. 

8 The elders, with whom I was brought up, were of a 
character not likely to let slip the sacred observance of 
any old institution; and the ringing out of the Old Year 
was kept by them with circumstances of peculiar cere- 
mony. — In those days the sound of those midnight 
chimes, though it seemed to raise hilarity in all around 
me, never failed to bring a train of pensive imagery 
into my fancy. Yet I then scarce conceived what it 
meant, or thought of it as a reckoning that concerned me. 
Not childhood alone, but the young man till thirty, never 
feels practically that he is mortal. He knows it indeed, 
and, if need were, he could preach a homily on the frag- 
ility of life ; but he brings it not home to himself, any 
more than in a hot June we can appropriate to our imag- 
ination the freezing days of December. 2 But now, shall 
I confess a truth ? — I feel these audits but too power- 
fully. I begin to count the probabilities of my duration, 
and to grudge at the expenditure of moments and short- 
est periods, like misers' farthings. In proportion as the 
years both lessen and shorten, I set more count upon 



O, who can hold a fire in his hand 
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? 
Or wallow naked in December snow 
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat ? " 

— Richard II., Act I, Scene 3. 



CHARLES LAMB 329 

their periods, and would fain lay my ineffectual finger 
upon the spoke of the great wheel. I am not content to 
pass away " like a weaver's shuttle." Those metaphors 
solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of 
mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that 
smoothly bears human life to eternity ; and reluct at the 
inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green 
earth ; the face of town and country ; the unspeakable 
rural solitudes ; and the sweet security of streets. I would 
set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at 
the edge to which I am arrived ; I and my friends ; to be 
no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to 
be weaned by age ; or drop, 3 like mellow fruit, as they 
say into the grave. — Any alteration, on this earth of 
mine, in diet or in lodging, puzzles and discomposes 
me. My household-gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and 
are not rooted up without blood. 4 They do not willingly 
seek Lavinian shores. A new state of being staggers me. 

9 Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and sum- 
mer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the deli- 
cious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and 
the cheerful glass, and candlelight, and fireside conver- 
sations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself 
— do these things go out with life ? 

10 Can a ghost laugh, or shake his gaunt sides, when 
you are pleasant with him ? 

And you, my midnight darlings, my Folios ! must I 



3 " So mayst thou live, till, like ripe fruit, thou drop 

Into thy mother's lap ; or be with ease 
Gathered, not harshly plucked." 

— Milton, Paradise Lost, XI, 531. 

4 Remember an experience of Virgil's hero, JEncid, Book III, 
line 28. 



330 ESSAYS OF ELI A 

part with the intense delight of having you (huge arm- 
fuls) in my embraces? Must knowledge come to me, if 
it comes at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, 
and no longer by this familiar process of reading? 

Shall I enjoy friendships there, wanting the smiling 
indications which point me to them here, — the recog- 
nizable face — the "sweet assurance of a look" — ? 5 
ii In winter this intolerable disinclination to dying: — 
to give it its mildest name — does more especially haunt 
and beset me. In a genial August noon, beneath a swelter- 
ing sky, death is almost problematic. At those times do 
such poor snakes as myself enjoy an immortality. Then 
we expand and bourgeon. 6 Then we are as strong again, 
as valiant again, as wise again, and a great deal taller. 
The blast that nips and shrinks me, puts me in thoughts 
of death. All things allied to the insubstantial, wait upon 
that master- feeling ; cold, numbness, dreams, perplexity; 
moonlight itself, with its shadowy and spectral appear- 
ances, — that cold ghost of the sun, or Phoebus' sickly sis- 
ter, like that innutritious 7 one denounced in the Canticles : 
— I am none of her minions — I hold with the Persian. 8 



6 By comparing the last words of this paragraph with note 54 
in Adonais, the reader will see another specimen of free-and-easy 
quoting. 

6 " Heaven send it happy dew, 
Earth lend it sap anew, 
Gayly to bourgeon and broadly to grow." 

— The Lady of the Lake. 
T See The Song of Solomon, VIII, 8. 
8 A sun-worshiper. 




PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 
i 792- i 822. 

Painter, in his A History of English Literature, 
says : " Shelley is, perhaps, the most poetical of our poets. 
He has not the philosophic quality of Wordsworth, nor the 
versatile power of Byron ; but in sustained loftiness and 
sweep of imagination he surpasses both his great con- 
temporaries. He can never be a popular poet. He 
dwells habitually in an imaginative realm beyond the 
popular tastes and the popular capacity. No other poet 
seems to have the rapture of inspiration in a fuller de- 
gree. To some extent he was as the voice of one crying 
in a wilderness. He not only pointed out many of the 
evils of social life, but with steadfast faith prophesied a 
happier era. The principles that inspired much of his 
poetry, separated indeed from his extravagance, have 
since met with wide acceptance." 

A note written in 1839 by Mrs. Shelley reads : " There 
is much in the Adonais which seems now more appli- 
cable to Shelley himself than to the young and gifted poet 
whom he mourned." 

Shelley is perhaps the most noted example in that 
company of poets who live but a few years, and in those 
years do an amount of work which would not shame a 
long and busy life, and is almost beyond one's power to 
believe to be within the wide limits of human capacity. 

His contributions to literature are not all poems. He 
wrote pamphlets, and at least two novels which did not 
long survive. This, however, cannot be said of all his 
prose. The Defense of Poetry is one of the finest bits 

333 



334 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 

of prose and one of the best considered words on the 
side of poetry in the language. The prefaces and notes 
to some of his poems are well worth lingering over. 

He wrote dramas, Prometheus Unbound and The 
Cenci being the greatest; allegories, as A las tor, or the 
Spirit of Solitude; and The Revolt of Islam, A Poem 
in Twelve Cantos. 

It would not appear strange if some prophet should 
tell us that in centuries long hereafter the readers of that 
distant time should know Shelley as the author of Ado- 
nais, one of the half dozen great elegies; the Ode to the 
West Wind; The Skylark; The Cloud; the Lines Writ- 
ten Among the Euganean Hills, whatever may have been 
the fate of the long poems. 

The Adonais was one of Shelley's last poems. 

Every school-boy in literature knows the sad story 
of his end ; his attempt with two companions to cross the 
Gulf of Spezia in order to return to his home from Leg- 
horn, the storm, the agony of waiting the finding of the 
three bodies, in Shelley's pocket a volume of Keats's 
poems doubled back as if the reader had been interrupted 
in his reading and had thrust away the book in haste, the 
cremation of the bodies by the sailor Trelawny, Byron, 
and Leigh Hunt. The poet's ashes were deposited in the 
English burying ground at Rome. Trelawny placed a 
slab in the ground and inscribed it with Shelley's name, 
with an affectionate appositive, cor cordium, his date of 
birth and of death, with these lines from The Tempest: — 

" Nothing of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange." 



Adonais 



I weep for Adonais — he is dead ! 
O, weep for Adonais ! though our tears 
Thaw not the frost which binds so dear a head ! 
And thou, sad Hour, selected from all years 
To mourn our loss, rouse thy obscure compeers, s 

And teach them thine own sorrow, say : " With me 
Died Adonais ; till the Future dares 
Forget the Past, his fate and fame shall be 
An echo and a light unto eternity ! " 

Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, I0 

When thy Son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies 
In darkness ? where was lorn Urania x 
When Adonais died? With veiled eyes, 
'Mid listening Echoes, in her Paradise 
She sate, while one, with soft enamored breath, *s 

Rekindled all the fading melodies, 
With which, like flowers that mock the corse beneath, 
He had adorned and hid the coming bulk of death. 

O, weep for Adonais — he is dead ! 

Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep ! 20 

Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed 

Thy fiery tears, and let thy loud heart keep 

Like his, a mute and uncomplaining sleep ; 

For he is gone, where all things wise and fair 

Descend ; — oh, dream not that the amorous Deep 2S 



The Muse of Astronomy. 

335 



$ 5 6 ADONAIS 

Will yet restore him to the vital air ; 
Death feeds on his mute voice, and laughs at our despair. 

Most musical of mourners, weep again! 
Lament anew, Urania ! — He 2 died, 
Who was the Sire of an immortal strain, 3 30 

Blind, 4 old, and lonely, when his country's pride, 
The priest, the slave, and the liberticide, 
Trampled and mocked with many a loathed rite 
Of lust and blood ; he went, unterrified, 
Into the gulf of death; but his clear Sprite 3S 

Yet reigns o'er earth ; the third 5 among the sons of light. 

Most musical of mourners, weep anew ! 
Not all to that bright station dared to climb ; 
And happier they their happiness who knew, 
Whose tapers yet burn through that night of time 40 
In which suns perished; others more sublime, 
Struck by the envious wrath of man or God, 
Have sunk, extinct in their refulgent prime ; 
And some yet live, treading the thorny road, 
Which leads, through toil and hate, to Fame's serene 
abode. 6 4S 



2 Milton. 

3 breed, race. " The noblest of thy strain." — Shakespeare. 

4 " He passed the flaming bounds of place and time : 

The living throne, the sapphire blaze, 

Where angels tremble while they gaze, 

He saw ; but, blasted with excess of light, 

Closed his eyes in endless night." 

— Gray's The Progress of Poesy. 
6 Homer, 'Dante, Milton. 

" The first in loftiness of thought surpassed, 
The next in majesty, in both the last." — Dryden. 
8 " Ah ! who can tell how hard it is to climb 

The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar; 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 337 

But now, thy youngest, dearest one has perished, 
The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, 
Like* a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished, 
And fed with true love tears, instead of dew ; 
Most musical of mourners, weep anew ! 5 ° 

Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, 
The bloom, whose petals nipt before they blew 
Died on the promise of the fruit, is waste ; 
The broken lily lies — the storm is overpast. 

To that high Capital, 7 where kingly Death 8 ss 

Keeps his pale court in beauty and decay, 
He came ; and bought, with price of purest breath, 
A grave among the eternal. — Come away ! 
Haste, while the vault of blue Italian day 
Is yet his fitting charnel-roof ! while 'still 6o 

He lies, as if in dewy sleep he lay ; 
Awake him not ! surely he takes his fill 
Of deep and liquid rest, forgetful of all ill. 

He will awake no more, oh, never more ! — 

Within the twilight chamber spreads apace 6s 

The shadow of white Death, and at the door 

Invisible Corruption waits to trace 

His extreme 9 way to her dim dwelling-place ; 



Ah ! who can tell how many a soul sublime 
Has felt the influence of malignant star." 

— Beattie's The Minstrel. 

7 Rome. 

" for within the hollow crown 
That rounds the mortal temples of a king 
Keeps Death his Court." 

— Richard II., Act III, Scene 2. 

8 Shelley seems here and elsewhere to accent the first syllable of 
this word. 

22 



338 ADONAIS 

The eternal Hunger sits, but pity and awe 
Soothe her pale rage, nor dares she to deface 7° 

So fair a prey, till darkness, and the law 
Of change, shall o'er his sleep the mortal curtain draw. 

O, weep for Adonais ! — The quick Dreams, 
The passion-winged Ministers of thought, 
Who were his flocks, whom near the living streams 7S 
Of his young spirit he fed, and whom he taught 
The love which was its music, wander not, — 
. Wander no more, from kindling brain to brain, 
But droop there, whence they sprung ; and mourn their 

lot 
Round the cold heart, where, after their sweet pain, 8o 
They ne'er will gather strength, or find a home again. 

And one with trembling hands clasps his cold head, 
And fans him with her moonlight wings, and cries; 
" Our love, our hope, our sorrow, is not dead ; 
See, on the silken fringe of his faint eyes, 8 = 

Like dew upon a sleeping flower, there lies 
A tear some Dream 10 has loosened from his brain." 
Lost Angel of a ruined Paradise ! 
She knew not 'twas her own ; as with no stain 
She faded, like a cloud which had outwept its rain. 9° 

One from a lucid urn of starry dew 
Washed his light limbs as if embalming them ; 
Another dipt her profuse locks, and threw 
The wreath upon him, like an anadem,° 



1 He bids thee to him send for his intent 
A fit false Dreame." 

— The Faerie Queene, Canto I, Stanza 43. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 339 

Which frozen tears instead of pearls begem; 95 

Another in her wilful grief would break 
Her bow and winged reeds, as if to stem 
A greater loss with one which was more weak ; 
And dull the barbed fire against his frozen cheek. 

Another Splendor on his mouth alit, I0 ° 

That mouth, whence it was wont to draw the breath 
Which gave it strength to pierce the guarded wit, 
And pass into the panting heart beneath 
With lightning and with music : the damp death 
Quenched its caress upon his icy lips ; I0S 

And, as a dying meteor stains 1X a wreath 
Of moonlight vapor, which the cold night clips, 12 
It flushed through his pale limbs, and past to its eclipse. 

And others came . . . Desires and Adorations, 
Winged Persuasions and veiled Destines, II0 

Splendors, and Glooms, and glimmering Incarnations 
Of hopes and fears, and twilight Phantasies; 
And Sorrow, with her family of Sighs, 
And Pleasure, blind with tears, led by the gleam 
Of her own dying smile instead of eyes, IIS 

Came in slow pomp ; — the moving pomp might seem 
Like pageantry of mist on an autumnal stream. 

All he had loved, and molded into thought, 
From shape, and hue, and odor, and sweet sound, 
Lamented Adonais. Morning sought I20 

Her eastern watch-tower, and her hair unbound, 
Wet with the tears which should adorn the ground, 



11 tints. 

12 clasps, line 417. 



340 ADONAIS 

Dimmed the aerial eyes that kindle day; 
Afar the melancholy thunder moaned, 
Pale Ocean in unquiet slumber lay, I2S 

And the wild winds flew round, sobbing in their dismay. 

Lost Echo 13 sits amid the voiceless mountains, 
And feeds her grief with his remembered lay, 
And will no more reply to winds or fountains, 
Or amorous birds perched on the young green spray, 130 
Or herdsman's horn, or bell at closing day ; 
Since she can mimic not his 14 lips, more dear 
Than those for whose disdain she pined away 
Into a shadow of all sounds : — a drear 
Murmur, between their songs, is all the woodmen hearts 

Grief made the young Spring wild, and she threw down 
Her kindling buds, as if she Autumn were, 15 
Or they dead leaves ; since her delight is flown 
For whom should she have waked the sullen year? 
To Phoebus was not Hyacinth so dear I4 ° 

Nor to himself Narcissus as to both 
Thou Adonais : wan they 16 stand and sere • 
Amid the faint companions of their youth, 
With dew all turned to tears ; odor, to sighing ruth." 

Thy spirit's sister, the lorn nightingale 17 I4S 



13 " Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv'st unseen 

Within thy aery shell." — Comus. 
Why " voiceless "? 

14 Those of Adonais, dearer than those of Narcissus, for whom 
she pined into a shadow, or " a babbling gossip of the air." 

15 Notice that Shelley rhymes were and year. 

16 Buds, or Hyacinth and Narcissus ? 

17 " Every thing did banish moan, 

Save the nightingale alone. 



PERCY BY S SHE SHELLEY 341 

Mourns not her mate with such melodious pain ; 
Not so the eagle, who like thee could scale 
Heaven, and could nourish in the sun's domain 
Her mighty youth, with morning doth complain, 
Soaring and screaming round her empty nest, '5° 

As Albion 18 wails for thee : the curse of Cain 
Light on his 10 head who pierced thy innocent breast, 
And scared the angel soul that was its earthly guest ! 

Ah woe is me ! Winter is come and gone, 
But grief returns with the revolving year; ISS 

The airs and streams renew their joyous tone; 
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear; 
Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead Seasons' bier; 
The amorous birds now pair in every brake, 
And build their mossy homes in field and brere; 20 l6 ° 
And the green lizard, and the golden snake, 
Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake. 

Through wood and stream and field and hill and Ocean 
A quickening life from the earth's heart has burst 
As it has ever done, with change and motion, l65 

From the great morning of the world when first 
God dawned on Chaos ; in its steam immersed 
The lamps of Heaven flash with a softer light ; 
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst; 21 



She, poor bird, as all forlorn 

Leaned her breast up till a thorn, 

And there sung the dolefull'st ditty, 

That to hear it was a pity." — The Passionate Pilgrim. 

18 England. 

19 The critic in the Quarterly Review. 

20 briar. 

21 A holy desire to live. 



342 ADONAIS 

Diffuse themselves ; and spend in love's delight, }?° 
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might. 

The leprous corpse touched by this spirit tender 
Exhales itself in flowers of gentle breath; 
Like incarnations of the stars when splendor 
Is changed to fragrance, they 22 illumine death J 7S 

And mock the merry worm that wakes beneath 
Nought we know, dies. Shall that alone which knows 23 
Be as a sword consumed before the sheath 
By sightless lightning? — th' intense atom 24 glows 
A moment, then is quenched in a most cold repose. l8 ° 

Alas ! that all we loved of him should be, 
But for our grief, as if it had not been, 
And grief itself be mortal ! Woe is me ! 25 
Whence are we, and why are we ? 26 of what scene 
The actors or spectators? Great and mean l8 s 

Meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow. 
As long as skies are blue, and fields are green, 
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow, 
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to 
sorrow. 

He will awake no more, oh, never more ! I9 ° 

" Wake thou," cried Misery, " childless Mother, rise 
Out of thy sleep, and slake, in thy heart's core, 
A wound more fierce than his with tears and sighs." 



22 The flowers. 

23 The soul. 

24 But shall the soul do so ? 

25 The indirect objective, or dative, sometimes follows the verb 
to be and its equivalent worth. 

26 " What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue ! " 

— Burke. 



PERCY BY S SHE SHELLEY 343 

And all the Dreams that watched Urania's eyes, 
And all the Echoes whom their sister's song J 95 

Had held in holy silence, cried : " Arise ! " 
Swift as a Thought by the snake Memory stung, 
From her ambrosial rest the fading Splendor sprung. 

"She rose like an autumnal Night, that springs 
Out of the East, and follows wild and drear 200 

The golden Day, which, on eternal wings, 
Even as a ghost abandoning a bier, 
Had left the Earth a corpse. Sorrow and fear 
So struck, so roused, so rapt Urania ; 
So saddened round her like an atmosphere 20S 

Of stormy mist ; so swept her on her way 
Even to the mournful place where Adonais lay. 

Out of her secret Paradise she sped, 

Through camps and cities rough with stone, and steel, 

And human hearts, which to her aery tread 2I0 

Yielding not, wounded the invisible 

Palms of her tender feet where'er they fell : 

And barbed tongues, and thoughts more sharp than 

they 
Rent the soft Form they never could repel, 
Whose sacred blood, like the young tears of May, 2IS 
Paved with eternal flowers that undeserving 27 way. 

In the death chamber for a moment Death 

Shamed by the presence of that living Might 

Blushed to annihilation, 28 and the breath 

Revisited those lips, and life's pale light 220 



27 Lines 209 and following. 

28 Death died. 



344 ADONAIS 

Flashed through those limbs, so late her dear delight. 
" Leave me not wild and drear and comfortless, 
As silent lightning leaves the starless night ! 29 
Leave me not ! " cried Urania : her distress 
Roused Death : Death rose and smiled, and met her vain 
caress. 

" Stay yet awhile ! speak to me once again ; 226 

Kiss me, so long but as a kiss may live ; 
And in my heartless breast and burning brain 
That word, that kiss shall all thoughts else survive, 
With food of saddest memory kept alive, 2 3° 

Now thou art dead, as if it w'ere a part 
Of thee, my Adonais ! I would give 
All that I am to be as thou now art ! 
But I am chained to Time, and cannot thence depart! 

" Oh gentle child, beautiful as thou wert, 2 3S 

Why didst thou leave the trodden paths of men 
Too soon, and with weak hands though mighty heart 
Dare the unpastured 30 dragon in his den ? 
Defenseless as thou wert, oh where was then 
Wisdom the mirrored shield, or scorn the spear? 2 4° 
Or hadst thou waited the full cycle, 31 when 
Thy spirit should have filled its crescent sphere, 
The monsters of life's waste had fled from thee like deer. 

"The herded wolves, bold only to pursue; 

The obscene ravens, clamorous o'er the dead ; 24S 

The vultures to the conqueror's banner true 

Who feed where Desolation first has fed, 



" The fitful gleams the darkness swallowed." — Burns, 
' unfed, therefore hungry. 
Maturity. 



PERCY BY S SHE SHELLEY 345 

And whose wings rain contagion ; — how they fled, 
When like Apollo, from his golden bow, 
The Pythian 32 of the age one arrow sped 
And smiled ! — The spoilers tempt no second blow, 
They fawn on the proud feet that spurn them lying low. 

" The sun comes forth, and many reptiles spawn ; 
He sets, and each ephemeral insect then 
Is gathered into death without a dawn, 2 ss 

And the immortal stars awake again; 
So is it in the world of living men : 
A godlike mind soars forth, in its delight 
Making earth bare and veiling heaven, and when 
It sinks, the swarms that dimmed or shared its light z6 ° 
Leave to its kindred lamps the spirit's awful night." - 

Thus ceased she : 33 and the mountain shepherds 34 came, 
Their garlands sere, their magic mantles rent ; 35 
The Pilgrim 3(i of Eternity, whose fame 
Over his living head like Heaven is bent, 2<5 5 

An early but enduring monument, 
Came, veiling all the lightnings of his song 
In sorrow ; from her wilds Ierne 3T sent 
The sweetest lyrist 38 of her saddest wrong, 
And love taught grief to fall like music from his tongue. 

Midst others of less note, came one frail Form, 39 2 ?i 



•'■ Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviezvers. 

33 Urania. 

34 The poets. 

311 In token of grief. 
80 Byron. 

37 Ireland. 

38 Moore. 

" The four stanzas beginning with line 271 unquestionably 
refer to Shelley himself.'* — Hallcck. 



346 AD0NA1S 

A phantom among men ; companionless 
As the last cloud of an expiring storm 
Whose thunder is its knell ; he, as I guess, 
Had gazed on Nature's naked loveliness, 27S 

Actaeon-like, 40 and now he fled astray 
With feeble steps o'er the world's wilderness, 
And his own thoughts, along that rugged way, 
Pursued, like raging hounds, their father and their prey.. 

A pardlike Spirit beautiful and swift — 28 ° 

A Love in desolation masked ; — a Power 
Girt round weakness ; — it can scarce uplift 
The weight of the superincumbent hour; 
It is a dying lamp, a falling shower, 
A breaking billow ; — even whilst we speak 28s 

Is it not broken ? On the withering flower 
The killing sun smiles brightly : on a cheek 
The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may 
break. 

His head was bound with pansies overblown, 
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue; 2 ^° 

And a light spear topped with a cypress cone, 
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy tresses grew 
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew, 
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart 
Shook the weak hand that grasped it ; of that crew 29S 
He came the last, neglected and apart ; 
A herd-abandoned deer struck by the hunter's dart. 

All stood aloof, and at his partial moan 



40 Actaeon gazed upon Diana unappareled, and she changed 
him into a stag. The hounds then pursued him to the death. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 347 

Smiled through their tears ; well knew that gentle band 
Who in another's fate now wept his own; 3 °° 

As in the accents of an unknown 41 land, 
He sung new sorrow ; sad Urania scanned 
The Stranger's mien, and murmured: "Who art thou?" 
He answered not, but with a sudden hand 
Made bare his branded and ensanguined brow, 42 30S 
Which was like Cain's or Christ's — Oh ! that it should 
"be so! 

What softer voice is hushed over the dead ? 
Athwart what brow is that dark mantle thrown ? 
What form leans sadly o'er the white death-bed, 
In mockery 43 of monumental stone, 310 

The heavy heart heaving without a moan? 
If it be He, 44 who, gentlest of the wise, 
Taught, soothed, loved, honored the departed one; 
Let me not vex, with inharmonious sighs 
The silence of that heart's accepted sacrifice. 315 

Our Adonais has drunk poison — oh ! 

What deaf and viperous murderer could crown 

Life's early cup with such a draught of woe? 

The nameless worm would now itself disown: 

It felt, yet could escape 45 the magic tone 32 ° 

Whose prelude held all envy, hate, and wrong, 

But what was howling in one breast 4G alone, 



"Because Shelley was in virtual exile? 

42 Is this an answer ? " Branded " with a variety of charges. 
"Ensanguined," bloody, how so? 

43 imitation. 

44 Leigh Hunt. 

40 resist the influence of. 
4 " Jeffrey's. 



348 ADONAIS 

Silent with expectation of the song, 
Whose master's hand is cold, whose silver lyre unstrung. 

Live thou, whose infamy is not thy fame ! 32S 

Live ! fear no heavier chastisement from me, 
Thou noteless blot on a remembered name! 
But be thyself, and know thyself to be ! 
And ever at thy season 47 be thou free 
To still the venom when thy fangs o'erflow : 33 ° 

Remorse and Self-contempt shall cling to thee ; 
Hot Shame shall burn upon thy secret brow, 
And like a beaten hound tremble thou shalt — as now. 

Nor let us weep that our delight is fled 
Far from these carrion kites 4S that scream below ; 335 
He wakes or sleeps with the enduring dead ; 
Thou canst not soar where he is sitting now. — 
Dust to the dust ! but the pure spirit shall flow 
Back to the burning fountain whence it came, 
A portion of the Eternal, which must glow 34 ° 

Through time and change, unquenchably the same, 
Whilst thy cold embers choke the sordid hearth of shame. 

Peace, peace ! he is not dead, he doth not sleep — 
He hath awakened from the dream of life — 
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep 345 

With phantoms an unprofitable strife, 
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife 49 



The time of the year when the viper's poison-sack is full. 
1 "And kites 

Fly o'er our heads, and downward look on us, 
As we were sickly prey." — Julius Casar, Act V, Scene i. 
"A prey for carrion kites." 

— Henry VI., Part II, Act V, Scene 2. 
"A dagger of the mind." — Macbeth, Act II, Scene i. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 349 

Invulnerable nothings. — We decay 
Like corpses in a charnel : fear and grief 
Convulse us and consume us day by day, 3S ° 

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. 

He has outsoared the shadow of our night ; 
Envy and calumny and hate and pain, 
And that unrest which men miscall delight, 
Can touch him not and torture not again; 3SS 

From the contagion of the world's slow stain 50 
He is secure, and now can never mourn 
A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain; 
Nor, when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, 
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn. 36 ° 

He lives, he wakes — 'tis Death is dead, not he ; 
Mourn not for Adonais — Thou young Dawn 
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee 
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone ; 
Ye Caverns and ye Forests, cease to moan ! s6s 

Cease ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou Air 
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown 
O'er the abandoned Earth, now leave it bare 
Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair ! 

He is made one with Nature : 51 there is heard 37 ° 

His voice in all her music, from the moan 

Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird ; 

He is a presence to be felt and known 

In darkness and in light from herb and stone, 



60 " black and grained spots 

As will not leave their tinct." — Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4. 

61 "All are but parts of one stupendous whole." 

— Essay on Man, line 267. 



350 ADONAIS 

Spreading itself where'er that Power may move 37S 
Which has withdrawn his being to its own : 
Which wields the world with never wearied love, 
Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. 

He is a portion of the loveliness 
Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear 38 ° 
His part, while the one Spirit, 52 plastic stress 
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there, 
All new successions to the forms they wear ; 
Torturing th' unwilling dross that checks its flight 
To its own likeness, as each mass may bear ; 38s 

And bursting in its beauty and its might 
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light. 

The splendors of the firmament of time 
May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not ; 
Like stars to their appointed height they climb 39 ° 

And death is a low mist which cannot blot 
The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought 
Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair, 
And love and life contend in it, for what 
Shall be its earthly doom, the dead live there 39S 

And move like winds of light on dark and stormy air. 

The inheritors of unfulfilled renown 

Rose from their thrones, built beyond mortal thought, 

Far in the Unapparent. Chatterton 53 



52 The Power, line 375. 

53 " I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous boy, 
The sleepless soul that perished in his pride." 

— Wordsworth. 
Born in 1752, lived eighteen years, wrote poems which he claimed 
were written in the reign of Edward IV. He died by his own 
hand. " This is the most extraordinary young man that has encoun- 
tered my knowledge." — Dr. Johnson, " Mad, I think." — Byron. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 351 

Rose pale, his solemn agony had not 400 

Yet faded from him ; Sidney,"' 4 as he fought 
And as he fell and as he lived and loved 
Sublimely mild, a Spirit without spot, 
Arose ; and Lucan, 55 by his death approved : 
Oblivion as they rose shrank like a thing reproved. <° 5 

And many more, whose names on Earth are dark, 
But whose transmitted effluence cannot die 
So long as fire outlives the parent spark, 
Rose, robed in dazzling immortality. 
" Thou art become as one of us," they cry, 4*° 

" It was for thee 5G yon kingless sphere has long 
Swung blind in unascended majesty, 
Silent alone amid a Heaven of Song. 
Assume thy winged throne, thou Vesper of our throng! " 

Who mourns for Adonais? oh come forth 4IS 

Fond wretch ! and know thyself and him aright. 
Clasp with thy panting soul the pendulous Earth ; 
As from a center, dart thy spirit's light 
Beyond all worlds, until its spacious light 
Satiate the void circumference : then shrink 420 

Even to a point within our day and night ; 
And keep thy heart light lest it make thee sink 
When hope has kindled hope, and lured thee to the brink. 



"* The English hero who, wounded unto death, passed on the 
cup of water to some one whose need was greater. Spenser wrote 
of him : — 

" A sweet, attractive kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face, 

The lineaments of gospel books." 
65 A Latin poet of the time of Nero. This ruler suppressed 
Lucan's poems. L. in a fit of resentment joined in a conspiracy 
against the tyrant. He was put to death. His age was about 26. 
00 Keats. 



3$ * ADONAIS 

Or go to Rome, which is the sepulcher 
O, not of him, but of our joy : 'tis naught 57 425 

That ages, empires, and religions there 
Lie buried in the ravage they have wrought; 
For such as he can lend, — they borrow not 
Glory from those 58 who made the world their prey ; 
And he is gathered to the kings of thought 43 ° 

Who waged contention with their time's decay, 
And of the past are all that cannot pass away. 

Go thou to Rome, — at once the Paradise, 
The grave, 59 the city, and the wilderness ; 
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise, 43S 
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress 
The bones of Desolation's nakedness 
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead 
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access 
Where, like an infant's smile, over the dead 44 ° 

A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread. 

And gray walls molder round, on which dull Time 
Feeds, like slow fire upon a hoary brand ; 
And one keen pyramid with wedge sublime, 
Pavilioning the dust of him 60 who planned 44S 



57 Nothing. 

68 tyrants. They have no glory to impart, to " lend." Not so, 
Adonais. 

59 " Those who say that the ruins of Rome at least are to be 
seen, say too much, for the ruins of so tremendous a fabric would 
bring more honor and reverence to her memory ; here is nothing 
but her place of burial." — Montaigne, 1580. 

00 " Keats died at Rome, and was buried in the romantic and 
lonely cemetery of the Protestants under the pyramid which is the 
tomb of Cestius, and the mossy walls and tombs, now moldering 
and desolate, which formed the circuit of ancient Rome. The 
cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with 
violets and daisies." — From Shelley's Preface. 



PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY 353 

This refuge for his memory, cloth stand 
Like flame transformed :o marble ; and beneath, 
A field is spread, on which a newer band 
Have pitched in Heaven's smile their camp of death 
Welcoming him we lose with scarce extinguished 
breath. 450 

Here pause : C1 these graves are all too young as yet 
To have outgrown the sorrow which consigned 
Its charge to each, and if the seal is set, 
Here, on one fountain of a mourning mind, 
Break it not thou ! too surely shalt thou find 455 

Thine own well full, if thou returnest home, 
Of tears and gall. From the world's bitter wind 
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb. 
What Adonais is, why fear we to become? 

The One remains, the many change and pass ; 46 ° 

Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly ; 
Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, 
Stains the white radiance of Eternity. 
Until Death tramples it to fragments. — Die, 
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! 46s 
Follow where all is fled ! — Rome's azure sky, 
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak 
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. 

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart? 
Thy hopes are gone before : from all things here 47 ° 
They have departed ; thou shouldst now depart ! 
A light is past from the revolving year, 
And man, and woman; and what still is dear 



The " fond wretch " of line 416. 
23 



354 ADONAIS 

Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither. 
The soft sky smiles, — the low wind whispers near ; 475 
'Tis Adonais calls ! oh hasten thither, 
No more let Life divide what Death can join together. 

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe, 
That Beauty in which all things work and move, 
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse 48 ° 

Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love 
Which through the web of being blindly wove 
By man and beast and earth and air and sea, 
Burns bright or dim, as each 62 are mirrors of 
The fire for which all thirst ; now beams on me, 48s 
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality. 

The breath whose might I have invoked in song 
Descends on me ; my spirit's bark is driven, 
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng 
Whose sails were never to the tempest given ; 490 
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven! 
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar; 
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven, 
The soul of Adonais, like a star, 
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. 495 

62 As they each. 




EDMUND BURKE 



EDMUND BURKE. 
1729-1797. 

When the word "orator" or "oratory" is pronounced 
in the hearing of people who speak and read the English 
language, the name at the head of this note is likely to 
be the first one to come before the mind's eye. 

" The only Englishmen who stand in a class with 

Webster are Burke, the most philosophic of orators and 

statesmen, and Fox, who of all the characters of history, 

is one of the most easily loved. 

* * * 

" On the whole, I think it safe to say that Webster is 
not surpassed by Burke, and if he is equaled by any 
other English-speaking orator he is equaled by Burke 
alone. 

" The glowing oratory of Edmund Burke will live 
until sensibility to beauty and the generous love of liberty 
shall die." — Sentences from the Hon. Samuel W . Ale- 
Call's " Webster Centennial Oration," September, ipoi. 

In Macaulay's second essay on Chatham, speaking of 
the bill for the repeal of the Stamp Act, the writer says : 
" Two great orators and statesmen, belonging to two 
different generations, repeatedly put forth all their 
powers in defense of the bill. The House of Commons 
heard Pitt for the last time, and Burke for the first 
time, and was in doubt to which of them the palm of 
eloquence should be assigned. It was indeed a splendid 
sunset and a splendid dawn." Pitt, having become Lord 
Chatham, passed into the Upper House. 

In the same charming piece of historical writing, 

357 



358 EDMUND BURKE 

Macaulay makes the confident prediction : " These sound 
doctrines were, during a long course of years, inculcated 
by Burke, in orations, some of which will last as long 
as the English language." 

The great speeches here alluded to are surely the 
one on American Taxation and that on Conciliation with 
America, discourses which form a part of every even 
moderately liberal course of reading in American his- 
tory, and their right to be there is absolutely incon- 
testable. 

If, happily, a love of Burke be the result of these 
studies, — and what better thing could happen to the 
reader ? — he will not need urging to proceed to the enjoy- 
ment of other treasures of which Burke left humanity 
heir, some of the greatest of which sprang from Eng- 
lish conquest and control in India, and from that awful 
historic storm, the French Revolution. 

Burke wrote a book upon the Sublime and Beautiful, 
characterized by fine esthetic taste, lofty imagination, 
and eloquent utterance. 

After Burke had retired from public life, the king 
conferred a pension upon him which was made the 
occasion for a torrent of abuse from his enemies. His 
defense seems to stand alone in its type of literature 
and biography. It is A Letter to a Noble Lord. 



A Letter to a Noble Lord 1 



i My Lord : I could hardly flatter myself with the hope 
that so very early in the season I should have to acknowl- 
edge obligations to the Duke of Bedford and to the Earl 
of Lauderdale. These noble persons have lost no time 
in conferring upon me that sort of honor which it is alone 
within their competence, and which it is certainly most 
congenial to their natures and their manners, to bestow. 

To be ill spoken of, in whatever language they speak, 
by the zealots of the new sect in philosophy and politics, 
of which these noble persons think so charitably, and of 
which others think so justly, to me is no matter of 
uneasiness or surprise. To have incurred the displeasure 
of the Duke of Orleans, 2 or the Duke of Bedford, to fall 
under the censure of Citizen Brissot, 2 or of his friend the 
Earl of Lauderdale, I ought to consider as proofs, not the 
least satisfactory, that I have produced some parts of the 
effect I proposed by my endeavors. I have labored hard 
to earn what the noble lords are generous enough to pay. 
Personal offense I have given them none. The part they 
take against me is from zeal to the cause. It is well ! — it 
is perfectly well! I have to do homage to their justice. 
I have to thank the Bedfords and the Lauderdales for 
having so faithfully and so fully acquitted toward me 



1 Earl Fitzwilliam, nephew of Rockingham, head of the min- 
istry of which Burke was a member. 

2 Prominent French revolutionists. Note the coupling of their 
names with the two Britons who are excoriated in this letter. 

359 



360 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

whatever arrear of debt was left undischarged by the 
Priestleys 3 and the Paines. 3 

2 Some, perhaps, may think them executors in their own 
wrong; I, at least, have nothing to complain of. They 
have gone beyond the demands of justice. They have been 
(a little, perhaps, beyond their intention) favorable to 
me. They have been the means of bringing out by their 
invectives the handsome things which Lord Grenville * 
has had the goodness and condescension to say in my 
behalf. Retired as I am from the world, and from all 
its affairs and all its pleasures, I confess it does kindle 
in my nearly extinguished feelings a very vivid satis- 
faction to be so attacked and so commended. It is sooth- 
ing to my wounded mind to be commended by an able, 
vigorous, and well-informed statesman, and at the very 
moment when he stands forth, with a manliness and reso- 
lution worthy of himself and of his cause, for the preser- 
vation of the person and government of our sovereign, 
and therein for the security of the laws, the liberties, the 
morals, and the lives of his people. To be in any fair 
way connected with such things is indeed a distinction. 
No philosophy can make me above it ; no melancholy can 
depress me so low as to make me wholly insensible to 
such an honor. Why will they not let me remain in 
obscurity and inaction? Are they apprehensive, that, if 
an atom of me remains, the sect has something to fear? 
Must I be annihilated, lest, like old John Zisca's, 5 my 



3 Englishmen who had written against Burke. All Americans 
know Thomas Paine. 

4 A distinguished statesman, a cousin of William Pitt ; at that 
time in the House of Lords he replied to the Duke of Bedford in 
Burke's defence. 

B A military hero of Bohemia in the fourteenth century. 



EDMUND BURKE 361 

skin might be made into a drum, to animate Europe to 
eternal battle against a tyranny that threatens to over- 
whelm all Europe and all the human race? 
3 My Lord, it is a subject of awful meditation. Before 
this of France, the annals of all time have not furnished 
an instance of a complete revolution. That revolution 
seems to have extended even to the constitution of the 
mind of man. It has this of wonderful in it, that it 
resembles what Lord Verulam 6 says of the operations of 
nature : It was perfect, not only in all its elements and 
principles, but in all its members and its organs from the 
very beginning. The moral scheme of France furnishes 
the only pattern ever known, which they who admire will 
instantly resemble. It is indeed an inexhaustible reper- 
tory of one kind of examples. In my wretched condition, 
though hardly to be classed with the living, I am not safe 
from them. They have tigers to fall upon animated 
strength. They have hyenas to prey upon carcasses. The 
national menagerie is collected by the first physiologists 
of the time ; and it is defective in no description of 
savage nature. They pursue, even such as me, into the 
obscurest retreats, and haul them before their revolution- 
ary tribunals. Neither sex, nor age — nor the sanctuary 
of the tomb is sacred to them. They have so determined 
a hatred to all privileged orders, that they deny even to 
the departed, the sad immunities of the grave. They are 
not wholly without an object. Their turpitude purveys 
to their malice; and they unplumb 7 the dead for bullets 
to assassinate the living. If all revolutionists were not 
proof against all caution, I should recommend it to their 

8 Francis Bacon. 

7 thrust them from their lead coffins. 



362 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

consideration, that no persons were ever known in history, 
either sacred 8 or profane, 9 to vex the sepulcher, and by 
their sorceries, to call up the prophetic dead, with any 
other event, 10 than the prediction of their own disastrous 
fate. — " Leave me, oh leave me to repose ! " 
4 In one thing I can excuse the Duke of Bedford for his 
attack upon me and my mortuary ° pension : He cannot 
readily comprehend 1X the transaction he condemns. What 
I have obtained was the fruit of no bargain, the produc- 
tion of no intrigue, the result of no compromise, the effect 
of no solicitation. The first suggestion of it never came 
from me, mediately or immediately, to his majesty or any 
of his ministers. It was long known that the instant my 
engagements would permit it, and before the heaviest of 
all calamities had forever condemned me to obscurity and 
sorrow, I had resolved on a total retreat. I had executed 
that design. I was entirely out of the way of serving or 
of hurting any statesman or any party, when the ministers 
so generously and so nobly carried into effect the spon- 
taneous bounty of the crown. Both descriptions have 
acted as became them. When I could no longer serve 
them, the ministers have considered my situation. When 
I could no longer hurt them, the revolutionists have 
trampled on my infirmity. My gratitude, I trust, is equal 
to the manner in which the benefit was conferred. It 
came to me, indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of 
mind and body, in which no circumstance of fortune could 



8 as Saul. 1 Samuel 28:19; 31 •' 4- 

9 as Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 1. 

10 result. 

11 " What evil thing have I done that such men praise me?" I 
am a party to a good honest transaction ; how can such a man under- 
stand it? 



EDMUND BURKE 363 

afford me any real pleasure. But this was no fault in the 
royal donor 12 or in his ministers, who were pleased, in 
acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the 
public, to assuage the sorrows of a desolate old man. 

5 It would ill become me to boast of anything. It would 
as ill become me, thus called upon, to depreciate the 
value of a long life, spent with unexampled toil in the 
service of my country. Since the total body of my 
services, on account of the industry which was shown in 
them, and the fairness of my intentions, have obtained 
trie acceptance of my sovereign, it would be absurd in me 
to range myself on the side of the Duke of Bedford and 
the corresponding society, or, as far as in me lies, to 
permit a dispute on the rate at which the authority 
appointed by our constitution to estimate such things, has 
been pleased to set them. 

6 Loose libels ought to be passed by in silence and con- 
tempt. By me they have been so always. I knew that 
as long as I remained in public, I should live down the 
calumnies of malice, and the judgments of ignorance. If 
I happened to be now and then in the wrong, as who is 
not, like all other men, I must bear the consequence of 
my faults and my mistakes. The libels of the present day, 
are just of the same stuff as the libels of the past. But 
they derive an importance from the rank of the persons 
they come from, and the gravity of the place 13 where 
they were uttered. In some way or other I ought to take 
some notice of them. To assert myself thus traduced is 
not vanity or arrogance. It is a demand of justice ; it is 
a demonstration of gratitude. If I am unworthy, the 

13 George III. 

18 The House of Lords. 



364 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

ministers are worse than prodigal. On that hypothesis, 
I perfectly agree with the Duke of Bedford. 

7 For whatever I have been (I am now no more) I put 
myself on my country. I ought to be allowed a reason- 
able freedom, because I stand upon my deliverance; and 
no culprit ought to plead in irons. Even in the utmost 
latitude of defensive liberty, I wish to preserve all possi- 
ble decorum. Whatever it may be in the eyes of these 
noble persons themselves, to me their situation calls for 
the most profound respect. If I should happen to tres- 
pass a little, which I trust I shall not, let it always be 
supposed that a confusion of characters may produce 
mistakes ; that, in the masquerades of the grand carnival 
of our age, whimsical adventures happen, odd things are 
said and pass off. If I should fail a single point in the 
high respect I owe to those illustrious persons, I cannot 
be supposed to mean the Duke of Bedford and the Earl 
of Lauderdale of the House of Peers, but the Duke of 
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale of Palace Yard 14 — 
the Dukes and Earls of Brentford. 15 There they are on 
the pavement; there they seem to come nearer to my 
humble level, and, virtually at least, to have waived their 
high privilege. 

8 Making this protestation, I refuse all revolutionary 
tribunals, where men have been put to death for no 
other reason than that they had obtained favors from the 
crown. I claim, not the letter, but the spirit of the old 
English law — ■ that is, to be tried by my peers. I decline 
his Grace's jurisdiction as a judge. I challenge the 
Duke of Bedford, as a juror, to pass upon the value of 

14 A place where many Englishmen had been put to death. 

15 Actors in a play. 



EDMUND BURKE 365 

my services. Whatever his natural parts may be, I 
cannot recognize in his few and idle years 16 the compe- 
tence to judge of my long and laborious life. If I can 
help it, he shall not be on the inquest of my quantum 
meruit. 11 Poor rich man! he can hardly know anything 
of public industry in its exertions, or can estimate its com- 
pensations when its work is done. I have no doubt of 
his Grace's readiness in all the calculations of vulgar 
arithmetic ; but I shrewdly suspect that he is very little 
studied in the theory of moral proportions, and has never 
learned the rule of three in the arithmetic of policy and 
state. 

9 His Grace thinks I have obtained too much. I answer, 
that my exertions, whatever they have been, were such 
as no hopes of pecuniary reward could possibly excite; 
and no pecuniary compensation can possibly reward 
them. Between money and such services, if done by abler 
men than I am, there is no common principle of com- 
parison : they are quantities incommensurable. 18 Money 
is made for the comfort and convenience of animal life. 
It cannot be a reward for what mere animal life must, 
indeed, sustain, but never can inspire. With submission 
to his Grace, I have not had more than sufficient. As 
to any noble use, I trust I know how to employ as well 
as he a much greater fortune than he possesses. In a 
more confined application, I certainly stand in need of 
every kind of relief and easement much more than he 
does. When I say I have not received more than I 
deserve — is this the language I hold to Majesty? No! 



1,1 The Duke was thirty years old. 

17 How much he has merited — my deserts. 

18 They have no common unit of measure. 



366 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

Far, very far, from it! Before that presence I claim no 
merit at all. Everything toward me is favor and bounty. 
One style to a gracious benefactor; another to a proud 
and insulting foe. 

10 His Grace is pleased to aggravate my guilt, by charg- 
ing my acceptance of his Majesty's grant as a departure 
from my ideas, and the spirit of my conduct with regard 
to economy. If it be, my ideas of economy were false 
and ill founded. But they are the Duke of Bedford's 
ideas of economy I have contradicted, and not my own. 
If he means to allude to certain bills brought in by me 
on a message from the throne in 1782, I tell him, that 
there is nothing in my conduct that can contradict either 
the letter or the spirit of those acts. Does he mean the 
pay-office act? I take it for granted he does not. The 
act to which he alludes is, I suppose, the establishment 
act. I greatly doubt whether his Grace has never read 
the one or the other. The first of these systems cost 
me, with every assistance which my then situation gave 
me, pains incredible. I found an opinion common 
through all the offices, and general in the public at large, 
that it would prove impossible to reform and methodize 
the office of paymaster-general. I undertook it, however, 
and I succeeded in my undertaking. Whether the mili- 
tary service, or whether the general economy of our 
finances have profited by that act, I leave to those who 
are acquainted with the army, and with the treasury, to 
judge. 

11 An opinion full as general prevailed also at the same 
time, that nothing could be done for the regulation of 
the civil-list establishment. The very attempt to intro- 
duce method into it, and any limitations to its services, 



EDMUND BURKE 367 

was held absurd. I had not seen the man, who so much 
as suggested one economical principle, or an economical 
expedient, upon that subject. Nothing but coarse ampu- 
tation, or coarser taxation, were 19 then talked of, both of 
them without design, combination, or the least shadow 
of principle. Blind and headlong zeal, or factious fury, 
were 19 the whole contribution brought by the most noisy 
on the occasion, toward the satisfaction of the public, 
of the relief of the crown. 

12 Let me tell my youthful censor that the necessities of 
that time required something very different from what 
others then suggested, or what his Grace now conceives. 
Let me inform him that it was one of the most critical 
periods in our annals. 

13 Astronomers have supposed that, if a certain comet, 
whose path intersected the ecliptic, had met the earth in 
some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us 
along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what 
regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of 
the Rights of Man (which " from its horrid hair shakes 
pestilence and war," and " with fear of change perplexes 
monarchs"), had that comet crossed upon us in that 
internal state of England, nothing human could have 
prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the high- 
way of heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and 
miseries of the French Revolution. 

14 Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. 20 Her 
hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off, 
but we preserved the body ; we lost our colonies, 21 but we 



1U Was would be better. 

20 Turned against all established order. 

- 1 American. 



368 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

kept our Constitution. There was, indeed, much intes- 
tine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and 
savage insurrection 22 quitted the woods, and prowled 
about our streets in the name of Reform. Such was the 
distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, 
in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, who might not 
count upon numbers to support his principles and execute 
his designs. 

15 Many of the changes, by a great misnomer called 
Parliamentary Reforms, went, not in the intention of all 
the professors and supporters of them, undoubtedly, but 
' went in their certain, and, in my opinion, not very remote 
effect, home to the utter destruction of the Constitution 
of this kingdom. Had they taken place, not France, but 
England, would have had the honor of leading up the 
death-dance of democratic revolution. Other projects, 
exactly coincident in time with those, struck at the very 
existence of the kingdom under any Constitution. There 
are who remember the blind fury of some, and the lamen- 
table helplessness of others ; here, a torpid confusion, 
from a panic fear of the danger — there, the same inac- 
tion, from a stupid insensibility to it ; here, well-wishers 
to the mischief — there, indifferent lookers on. At the 
same time, a sort of National Convention, dubious in its 
nature, and perilous in its example, nosed Parliament in 
the very seat of its authority, sat with a sort of superin- 
tendence over it, and little less than dictated to it, not 
only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature 
itself. In Ireland things ran in a still more eccentric 
course. Government was unnerved, confounded, and in 
a manner suspended. Its equipoise was totally gone. 

22 Lord George Gordon's riots. 



EDMUND BURKE 369 

I do not mean to speak disrespectfully of Lord North. 23 
He was a man of admirable parts, of general knowledge, 
of a versatile understanding fitted fox every sort of 
business, of infinite 24 wit and pleasantry, of a delightful 
temper, and with a mind most perfectly disinterested. 
But it would be only to degrade myself by a weak adula- 
tion, and not to honor the memory of a great man, to 
deny that he wanted something of the vigilance and 
spirit of command that the time required. Indeed, a 
darkness next to the fog of this awful day lowered over 
the whole region. For a little time the helm appeared 
abandoned. 

Ipse diem noctemque negat discernere ccelo, 
Nee meminisse vise media Palinurus 25 in unda. 

16 At that time I was connected with men of high place 
in the community. 26 They loved liberty as much as the 
Duke of Bedford can do ; and they understood it at least 
as well. Perhaps their politics, as usual, took a tincture 
from their character, and they cultivated what they loved. 
The liberty they pursued was a liberty inseparable from 
order, from virtue, from morals, and from religion, and 
was neither hypocritically nor fanatically followed. They 
did not wish that liberty, 27 in itself one of the first of 
blessings, should in its perversion become the greatest 
curse which could fall upon mankind. To preserve the 

23 Prime Minister from 1770 to 1782. 

24 "Alas, poor Yorick ! — a fellow of infinite jest, of most excel- 
lent fancy." — Hamlet. 

25 Pilot of the Trojan fleet. 

" Palinurus declared that he was not able to distinguish day 
and night, nor to remember his course over the sea." 
20 Fox, Lord Rockingham, Lord Shelburne. 

27 Unlike them of whom Milton in one of his sonnets said : — 
" License they mean when they cry liberty." 
24 



370 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

Constitution 28 entire, and practically equal to all the 
great ends of its formation, not in one single part, but 
in all its parts, was to them the first object. Popularity 
and power they regarded alike. These were with them 
only different means of obtaining that object, and had 
no preference over each other in their minds, but as 
one or the other might afford a surer or a less certain 
prospect of arriving at that end. It is some consolation 
to me, in the cheerless gloom which darkens the evening 
of my life, that with them I commenced my political 
career, and never for a moment, in reality nor in appear- 
ance, for any length of time, was separated from their 
good wishes and good opinion. 

17 By what accident it matters not, nor upon what desert, 
but just then, and in the midst of that hunt of obloquy 
which ever has pursued me with a full cry through life, I 
had obtained a very considerable degree of public confi- 
dence. I know well enough how equivocal a test this 
kind of popular opinion forms of the merit that obtained 
it. I am no stranger to the insecurity of its tenure. I 
do not boast of it. It is mentioned to show, not how 
highly I prize the thing, but my right to value the use 
I made of it. I endeavored to turn that short-lived advan- 
tage to myself, into a permanent benefit to my country. 
Far am I from detracting from the merit of some gentle- 
men, out of office or in it, on that occasion. No! it is 
not my way to refuse a full and heaped measure of justice 
to the aids that I receive. I have through life been 
willing to give everything to others, and to reserve noth- 
ing for myself but the inward conscience that I had 
omitted no pains to discover, to animate, to discipline, to 

28 Has Great Britain a written constitution? 



EDMUND BURKE 371 

direct the abilities of the country for its service, and to 
place them in the best light to improve their age, or to 
adorn it. This conscience ° I have. I have never sup- 
pressed any man, never checked him for a moment in his 
course, by any jealousy, or by any policy. I was always 
ready, to the height of my means (and they were always 
infinitely below my desires), to forward those abilities 
which overpowered my own. He is an ill-furnished un- 
dertaker 29 who has no machinery but his own hands to 
work with. Poor in my own facilities, I ever thought 
myself rich in theirs. In that period of difficulty and 
danger, more especially, I consulted and sincerely co- 
operated with men of all parties, who seemed disposed 
to the same ends, or to any main part of them. Nothing 
to prevent disorder was omitted : when it appeared, 
nothing to subdue it was left uncounselled nor unexe- 
cuted, as far as I could prevail. At the time I speak of, 
and having a momentary lead, so aided and so encour- 
aged, and as a feeble instrument in a mighty hand — I 
do not say I saved my country ; I am sure I did my 
country important service. There were few, indeed, that 
did not at that time acknowledge it ; and that time was 
thirteen years ago. It was but one voice, that no man in 
the kingdom better deserved an honorable provision 
should be made for him. 

18 So much for my general conduct through the whole 
of the portentous crisis from 1780 to 1782, and the gen- 
eral sense then entertained of that conduct by my country. 
But my character, as a reformer, in the particular in- 
stances which the Duke of Bedford refers to, is so con- 
nected in principle with my opinions on the hideous 

20 Not a " funeral director." 



372 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

changes, which have since barbarized France, and spread- 
ing thence, threaten the political and moral order of the 
whole world, that it seems to demand something of a 
more detailed discussion. 

19 My economical reforms were not, as his Grace may 
think, the suppression of a paltry pension or employment, 
more or less. Economy in my plan was, as it ought to 
be, secondary, subordinate, instrumental. I acted on 
state principles. I found a great distemper in the com- 
monwealth ; and, according to the nature of the evil and 
of the object, I treated it. The malady was deep ; it was 
complicated, in the causes and in the symptoms. 
Throughout it was full of contra-indicants. On one 
hand government, daily growing more invidious from an 
apparent increase of the means of strength, was every 
day growing more contemptible by real weakness. Nor 
was this dissolution confined to government ° commonly 
so called. It extended to Parliament; which was losing 
not a little in its dignity and estimation, by an opinion of 
its not acting on worthy motives. On the other hand, the 
desires of the people (partly natural and partly infused 
into them by art), appeared in so wild and inconsiderate 
a manner, with regard to the economical object (for I set 
aside for a moment the dreadful tampering with the body 
of the constitution itself) that if their petitions had liter- 
ally been complied with, the state would have been con- 
vulsed ; and a gate would have been opened, through 
which all property might be sacked and ravaged. Noth- 
ing could have saved the public from the mischiefs of 
the false reform but its absurdity; which would soon 
have brought itself, and with it all real reform, into dis- 
credit. This would have left a rankling wound in the 



EDMUND BURKE 373 

hearts of the people, who would know they had failed in 
the accomplishment of their wishes, but who, like the rest 
of mankind in all ages, would impute the blame to any- 
thing rather than to their own proceedings. But there 
were then persons in the world, who nourished complaint ; 
and would have been thoroughly disappointed if the 
people were ever satisfied. I was not of that humor. I 
wished that they should be satisfied. 30 It was my aim to 
give to the people the substance of what I knew they de- 
sired, and what I thought was right whether they desired 
it or not, before it had been modified for them into sense- 
less petitions. I knew that there is a manifest marked 
distinction, which ill men, with ill designs, or weak men 
incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, 
that is, a marked distinction between change and reforma- 
tion. The former alters the substance of the objects 
themselves ; and gets rid of all their essential good, as 
well as of all the accidental evil annexed to them. Change 
is novelty ; and whether it is to operate any one of the 
effects of reformation at all, or whether it may not con- 
tradict the very principle upon which reformation is 
desired, cannot be certainly known beforehand. Reform 
is, not a change in the substance, or in the primary 
modification of the object, but a direct application of a 
remedy to the grievance complained of. So far as that 
is removed, all is sure. It stops there ; and if it fails, the 
substance which underwent the operation, at the very 
worst, is but where it was. 

20 All this, in effect, I think, but am not sure, I have said 
elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated, 

30 " Tell him (Anthony), so please him come unto this place, 
He shall be satisfied." — Brutus. 



374 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into 
the currency of a proverb, To innovate is not to reform. 
The French revolutionists complained of everything ; they 
refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, 
nothing at all, unchanged. The consequences are before 
us, not in remote history, not in future prognostication: 
they are about us, they are upon us. They shake the 
public security; they menace private enjoyment. They 
dwarf the growth of the young ; they break the quiet of 
the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us 
in town: they pursue us to the country. Our business 
is interrupted, our repose is troubled, our pleasures are 
saddened, our very studies are poisoned and perverted, 
and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance by the 
enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The revolu- 
tion harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or 
from that chaotic anarchy, which generates equivocally 
" all monstrous, all prodigious things," cucoo-like, adul- 
terously lay their eggs, and brood 31 over, and hatch 31 
them in the nest of every neighboring state. These ob- 
scene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what 
divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and raven- 
ous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter 
over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and 
leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted 
with the slime of their filthy offal. 32 
21 If his Grace can contemplate the result of this complete 
innovation, or, as some friends of his will call it, reform, 
in the whole body of its solidity and compound mass, at 



31 The cuckoo lays her eggs in the nest of a smaller bird, to whom 
she leaves the " brooding " and the " hatching." 

32 Description taken from Virgil's Mneid, Book III. 



EDMUND BURKE 



375 



which, as Hamlet says, the face of heaven glows 33 with 
horror and indignation, and which, in truth, makes every 
reflecting mind and every feeling heart perfectly thought- 
sick, without a thorough abhorrence of everything they 
say and everything they do, I am amazed at the morbid 
strength or the natural infirmity of his mind. 
22 It was, then, not my love, but my hatred to innovation, 
that produced my plan of reform. Without troubling 
myself with the exactness of the logical diagram, I con- 
sidered them as things substantially opposite. It was to 
prevent that evil that I proposed the measures which his 
Grace is pleased, and I am not sorry he is pleased, to 
recall to my recollection. I had (what I hope that noble 
Duke will remember in all his operations) a state to pre- 
serve, as well as a state to reform. I had a people to 
gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claim 
half the credit for what I did as for what I prevented from 
being done. In that situation of the public mind, I did 
not undertake, as was then proposed, to new-model the 
House of Commons or the House of Lords, or to change 
the authority under which any officer of the crown acted, 
who was suffered at all to exist. Crown, lords, commons, 
judicial system, system of administration, existed as they 
had existed before, and in the mode and manner in which 
they had always existed. My measures were, what I then 
truly stated them to the House to be, in their intent, heal- 
ing and mediatorial. A complaint was made of too much 
influence in the House of Commons : I reduced it in both 
Houses ; and I gave my reasons, article by article, for 
every reduction, and showed why I thought it safe for 



" With tristful visage, as against the doom." 

— Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4, line 50, 



376 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

the service of the state. I heaved the lead 34 every inch of 
way I made. A disposition to expense was complained 
of: to that I opposed, not mere retrenchment, but a sys- 
tem of economy, which would make a random expense, 
without plan or foresight, in future, not easily practicable. 
I proceeded upon principles of research to put me in 
possession of my matter ; on principles of method to regu- 
late it; and on principles in the human mind and in civil 
affairs to secure and perpetuate the operation. I con- 
ceived nothing arbitrarily ; nor proposed anything to be 
done by the will and pleasure of others, or my own ; but 
by reason, and by reason only. I have ever abhorred, 
since the first dawn of my understanding to this its ob- 
scure 35 twilight, all the operations of opinion, fancy, in- 
clination, and will, in the affairs of government, where 
only a sovereign reason, paramount to all forms of legis- 
lation and administration, should dictate. Government is 
made for the very purpose of opposing that reason to will 
and to caprice, in the reformers or in the reformed, in the 
governors or in the governed, in kings, in senates, or in 
people. 

23 On a careful review, therefore, and analysis, of all the 
component parts of the civil list, and on weighing them 
against each other, in order to make, as much as possible, 
all of them a subject of estimate (the foundation and cor- 
ner-stone of all regular provident economy) it appeared 
to me evident, that this was impracticable, whilst that 
part, called the pension list, was totally discretionary in 
its amount. For this reason, and for this only, I proposed 
to reduce it, both in its gross quantity, and in its larger 

34 A sailor's metaphor. 

35 Can Burke be in earnest here? , 



EDMUND BURKE 377 

individual proportions, to a certainty : lest, if it were left 
without a general limit, it might eat up the civil list serv- 
ice ; if suffered to be granted in portions too great for the 
fund, it might defeat its own end ; and by unlimited allow- 
ances to some, it might disable the crown in means of pro- 
viding for others. The pension list was to be kept as 
a sacred fund; but it could not be kept as a constant 
open fund, sufficient for growing demands, if some 
demands would wholly devour it. The tenor of the act 
will show that it regarded the civil list only, the reduc- 
tion of which to some sort of estimate was my great 
object. 

24 No other of the crown funds did I meddle with, be- 
cause they had not the same relations. This of the four 
and a half per cent does his Grace imagine had escaped 
me, or had escaped all the men of business, who acted 
with me in those regulations ? I knew that such a fund 
existed, and that pensions had been always granted on it, 
before his Grace was born. This fund was fully in my 
eye. It was full in the eyes of those who worked with 
me. It was left on principle. On principle I did what 
was then done ; and on principle what was left undone 
was omitted. I did not dare to rob the nation of all 
funds to reward merit. If I pressed this point too close, 
I acted contrary to the avowed principles on which I 
went. Gentlemen are very fond of quoting me ; but if any 
one thinks it worth his while to know the rules that guided 
me in my plan of reform, he will read my printed speech 
on that subject; at least what is contained from page 230 
to page 241 in the second volume of the collection which 
a friend has given himself the trouble to make of my 
publications. Be this as it may, these two bills (though 



378 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

achieved with the greatest labor, and management of 
every sort, both within and without the house) were only 
a part, and but a small part, of a very large system, 
comprehending all the objects I stated in opening my 
proposition, and indeed many more, which I just hinted 
at in my speech 36 to the electors of Bristol, when I was 
put out of that representation. All these, in some state 
or other of forwardness, I have long by me. 
25 But do I justify his Majesty's grace on these grounds? 
I think them the least of my services. The time gave 
them an occasional 37 value. What I have done in the way 
of political economy was far from confined to this body of 
measures. I did not come into Parliament to con my 
lesson. I had earned my pension before I set my foot in 
St. Stephen's Chapel. 38 I was prepared and disciplined to 
this political warfare. The first session I sat in Parlia- 
ment, I found it necessary to analyze the whole commer- 
cial, financial, constitutional, and foreign interests of 
Great Britain and its empire. A great deal was then 
done ; and more, far more, would have been done, if 
more had been permitted by events. Then, in the vigor 
of my manhood, my constitution sunk under my labor. 
Had I then died (and I seemed to myself very near 
death), I had then earned for those who belonged to me 
more than the Duke of Bedford's ideas of service are of 
power to estimate. But, in truth, these services I am 
called to account for are not those on which I value my- 
self the most. If I were to call for a reward (which I 
have never # done), it should be for those in which, for 

36 One of Burke's greatest orations. 
SJ depending on the occasion. 
88 Parliament. 



EDMUND BURKE 379 

fourteen years without intermission, 39 I showed the most 
industry and had the least success ; I mean in the affairs 
of India. They are those on which I value myself the 
most; most for the importance, most for the labor, most 
for the judgment, most for constancy and perseverance 
in the pursuit. Others may value them most for the 
intention. In that, surely, they are not mistaken. 

26 Does his Grace think, that they who advised the crown 
to make my retreat 40 easy, considered me only as an econ- 
omist? That, well understood, however is a good deal. If 
I had not deemed it of some value, I should not have 
made political economy an object of my humble studies, 
from my very early youth to near the end of my service 
in Parliament, even before (at least to any knowledge of 
mine), it had employed the thoughts of speculative men in 
other parts of Europe. At that time it was still in its 
infancy in England, where, in the last century, it had 
its origin. Great and learned men thought my studies 
were not wholly thrown away, and deigned to communi- 
cate with me now and then on some particulars of their 
immortal works. Something of these studies may appear 
incidentally in some of the earliest things I published. 
The House has been witness to their effect, and has 
profited of them more or less, for above eight and twenty 
years. To their estimate I leave the matter. 

27 I was not, like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and 
rocked, and dandled into a legislator: " Nitor in adver- 
sum " 41 is the motto for a man like me. I possessed not 
one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts, that 

89 Referring to the impeachment of Warren Hastings, and the 
failure to convict. 

40 life in retirement. 

41 1 struggle against opposition. 



380 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. 
I was not made for a minion or a tool. As little did I 
follow the trade of winning the hearts by imposing on 
the understandings of the people. At every step of my 
progress in life (for in every step was I traversed and 
opposed), and at every turnpike 42 I met, I was obliged 
to show my passport, and again and again to prove my 
sole title to the honor of being useful to my country, by a 
proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its laws, 
and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at 
home. Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even, for me. 
I had no arts but manly arts. On them I have stood, and 
please God, in spite of the Duke of Bedford and the Earl 
of Lauderdale, to the last gasp 43 will I stand. 
28 Had his Grace condescended to inquire concerning the 
person whom he has not thought it below him to reproach, 
he might have found, that, in the whole course of my 
life, I have never, on any pretense of economy, or any 
other pretense, so much as in a single instance, stood 
between any man and his reward of service or his en- 
couragement in useful talent and pursuit, from the high- 
est of those services and pursuits to the lowest. On the 
contrary, I have on a hundred occasions exerted myself 
with singular zeal to forward every man's even tolerable 
pretensions. I have more than once had good-natured 
reprehensions from my friends for carrying the matter 
to something bordering on abuse. This line of conduct, 
whatever its merit might be, was partly owing to natural 

42 toll-gate. " She now keeps with her husband a turnpike, 
through which I often ride." — Thackeray. 

43 " Master, go on, and I will follow thee, 
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty." 

— As You Like It, Act II, Scene 3. 



EDMUND BURKE 381 

disposition, but I think full as much to reason and prin- 
ciple. I looked on the consideration of public service or 
public ornament to be real and very justice; and I ever 
held a scanty and penurious justice to partake of the 
nature of a wrong. I held it to be, in its consequences, 
the worst economy in the world. In saving money I soon 
can count up all the good I do ; but when by a cold 
penury I blast the abilities of a nation, and stunt the 
growth of its active energies, the ill I may do is beyond 
all calculation. Whether it be too much or too little, what- 
ever I have done has been general and systematic. I have 
never entered into those trifling vexations, and oppres- 
sive details, that have been falsely and most ridiculously 
laid to my charge. 

29 Did I blame the pensions given to Mr. Barre and Mr. 
Dunning between the proposition and execution of my 
plan ? No ! surely, no ! Those pensions were within my 
principles. I assert it, those gentlemen deserved their 
pensions, their titles, — all they had ; and if more they 
had, I should have been but pleased the more. They 
were men of talents ; they were men of service. I put 
the profession of the law out of the question in one of 
them. It is a service that rewards itself. But their 
public service, though, from their abilities unquestionably 
of more value than mine, in its quantity and in its dura- 
tion was not to be mentioned with it. But I never could 
drive a hard bargain in my life, concerning any matter 
whatever ; and least of all do I know how to haggle and 
huckster with merit. Pension for myself I obtained none ; 
nor did I solicit any. Yet I was loaded with hatred for 
everything that was withheld, and with obloquy for 
everything that was given. I was thus left to support the 



382 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

grants of a name 44 ever dear to me, and ever venerable to 
the world, in favor of those, who were no friends of mine 
or of his, against the rude attacks of those who were at 
that time friends to the grantees, and their own zealous 
partisans. I have never heard the Earl of Lauderdale 
complain of these pensions. He finds nothing wrong 
till he comes to me. This is impartiality, in the true 
modern revolutionary style. 

30 Whatever I did at that time, so far as it regarded 
order and economy, is stable and eternal ; as all principles 
must be. A particular order of things may be altered; 
order itself cannot lose its value. As to other particulars, 
they are variable by time and by circumstances. Laws of 
regulation are not fundamental laws. The public exigen- 
cies are the masters of all such laws. They rule the laws, 
and are not to be ruled by them. They who exercise the 
legislative power at the time must judge. 

31 It may be new to his Grace, but I beg leave to tell him 
that mere parsimony is not economy. It is separable in 
theory from it ; and in fact it may or it may not be a part 
of economy, according to circumstances. Expense, and 
great expense, may be an essential part in true economy. 
If parsimony were to be considered as one of the kinds 
of that virtue, there is, however, another and a higher 
economy. Economy is a distributive virtue, and consists, 
not in saving, but in selection. Parsimony requires no 
providence, no sagacity, no powers of combination, no 
comparison, no judgment. Mere instinct, and that not 
an instinct of the noblest kind, may produce this false 
economy in perfection. The other economy has larger 



u Lord Rockingham, 



EDMUND BURKE 383 

views. It demands a discriminating judgment, and a 
firm, sagacious mind. It shuts one door to impudent 
importunity, only to open another, and a wider, to unpre- 
suming merit. If none but meritorious service or real 
talent were to be rewarded, this nation has not wanted, 
and this nation will not want, the means of rewarding all 
the service it ever will receive, and encouraging all the 
merit it ever will produce. No state, since the foundation 
of society, has been impoverished by that species of pro- 
fusion. Had the economy of selection and proportion 
been at all times observed, we should not now have had 
an overgrown Duke of Bedford, to oppress the industry 
of humble men, and to limit, by the standard of his own 
conceptions, the justice, the bounty, or if he pleases, the 
charity 45 of the crown. 

32 His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my 
deserts in the far greater part of my conduct in life. It 
is free for him to do so. There will always be some 
difference of opinion in the value of political services. 
But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men 
living, ought to be the last to call in question. I have 
supported with very great zeal, and I am told with some 
degree of success, those opinions, or, if his Grace likes 
another expression better, those old prejudices, which 
buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and 
titles. I have omitted no exertion to prevent him and 
them from sinking to that level, to which the meretricious 
French faction, his Grace at least coquets with, omit no 
exertion to reduce both. I have done all I could to dis- 
countenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those 



46 Why does Burke use the term " charity " ? 



384 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent 
merit of their own. I have strained every nerve to keep 
the Duke of Bedford in that situation which alone makes 
him my superior. Your lordship has been a witness of 
the use he makes of that pre-eminence. 

33 But be it, that this is virtue ! Be it, that there is virtue 
in this well selected rigor ; yet all virtues are not equally 
becoming to all men and at all times. There are crimes, 
undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our 
existence, ought to put a generous antipathy in action ; 
crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a 
warm and animated pursuit. But all things, that concern, 
what I may call, the preventive police of morality, all 
things merely rigid, harsh and censorial, the antiquated 
moralists, at whose feet I was brought up, would not 
have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite 
virtues of young men of rank. What might have been 
well enough, and have been received with a veneration 
mixed with awe and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed 
Cato, 46 would have wanted something of propriety in the 
young Scipios, 47 the ornament of the Roman nobility, in 
the flower of their life. But the times, the morals, the 
masters, the scholars have all undergone a thorough 
revolution. It is a vile illiberal school, this new French 
academy of sans culottes. 48 There is nothing in it that is 
fit for a gentleman to learn. 

34 Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself, that 



46 Eminent Roman statesman, soldier, and writer. Cicero makes 
him one of the personages who talk in his great essay, Cato Maior 
De Senectute, The Elder Cato on Old Age. 

47 Men like Scipio. Cicero points to the younger Africanus as 
the ideal statesman. He makes him also a speaker in Dc Senectute. 

48 without short breeches, — applied to the Paris rabble generally. 



EDMUND BURKE 385 

the parents of the growing generation will be satisfied 
with what is to be taught to their children in Westminster, 
in Eton, or in Winchester: I still indulge the hope that 
no grown gentleman or nobleman of our time will think 
of finishing at Mr. Thelwall's lecture 49 whatever may 
have been left incomplete at the old universities of his 
country. I would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt 
for a motto, what was said of a Roman censor or praetor 
(or what was he), who in virtue of a Senatus consultant 
shut up certain academies, 

" Cludere ludum impudentiae jussit." 50 
Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will 
rejoice at the breaking up for the holidays, and will pray 
that there may be very long vacations in all such schools. 

35 The awful state of the time, and not myself or my own 
justification, is my true object in what I now write; or in 
what I shall ever write or say. It little signifies to the 
world what becomes of such things as me, or even as the 
Duke of Bedford. What I say about either of us is 
nothing more than a vehicle, as you, my Lord, will easily 
perceive, to convey my sentiments on matters far more 
worthy of your attention. It is when I stick to my 
apparent first subject that I ought to apologize, not when 
I depart from it. I therefore must beg your Lordship's 
pardon for again resuming it after this very short digres- 
sion ; assuring you that I shall never altogether lose sight 
of such matter as persons abler than I am may turn to 
some profit. 

36 The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to 



*" lectureship, the office or the school of a lecturer. 
60 " He commanded to close the school of impudence." 



386 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

call the attention of the House of Peers to his Majesty's 
grant to me, which he considers as excessive and out of 
all bounds. 

37 I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, 
that, whilst his Grace was meditating his well-considered 
censure upon me, he fell into a sort of sleep. Homer 51 
nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as 
dreams (even his golden dreams) are apt to be ill-pieced 
and incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his 
idea of reproach to me, but took the subject matter from 
the crown grants to his own family. This is " the stuff of 
which his dreams are made." 52 In that way of putting 
things together his Grace is perfectly in the right. The 
grants to the house of Russell were so enormous as not 
only to outrage economy, but even to stagger credibility. 
The Duke of Bedford is the leviathan among all the 
creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his unwieldy 
bulk, he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty. 
Huge as he is, and whilst " he lies floating many a 
rood," 53 he is still a creature. His ribs, his fins, his 
whalebone, his blubber, the very spiracles through which 
he spouts a torrent of brine against his origin, and covers 
me all over with the spray, everything of him and about 
him is from the throne. Is it for him to question the dis- 
pensation of the royal favor ? 



81 So Horace said. 

62 Adapted from Shakespeare's " We are such stuff as dreams 
are made on." 

63 Milton's Satan : — 

" Prone on the flood, extended long and large, 
Lay floating many a rood." 

— Paradise Lost, Book I, line 195. 



EDMUND BURKE 387 

38 I really am at loss to draw any sort of parallel between 
the public merits of his Grace, by which he justifies the 
grants he holds, and these services of mine, on the favor- 
able construction of which I have obtained what his Grace 
so much disapproves. In private life, I have not at all 
the honor of acquaintance with the noble Duke; but I 
ought to presume, — and it costs me nothing to do so, — 
that he abundantly deserves the esteem and love of all 
who live with him. But as to public service, why, truly, 
it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself, 
in rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, 
or figure, with the Duke of Bedford, than to make a 
parallel between his services and my attempts to be useful 
to my country. It would not be gross adulation but un^ 
civil irony, to say that he has any public merit of his own 
to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast 
landed pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they 
are, are original and personal : his are derivative. It is 
his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this 
inexhaustible fund of merit which makes his Grace so 
very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other 
grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain 
in quiet, I should have said, " 'Tis his estate : that's 
enough. It is his by law : what have I to do with it or 
its history ? " He would naturally have said, on his side, 
" 'Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my an- 
cestor was two hundred and fifty years ago. I am a 
young man with very old pensions ; he is an old man 
with very young pensions — that's all." 

39 Will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly 
to compare my little merit with that which obtained from 
the crown those prodigies of profuse donation by which 



3 88 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious 
individuals? I would willingly leave him to the herald's 
college, which the philosophy of the sans culottes will 
abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians, re- 
corders, and blazoners of virtues and arms, differ wholly 
from that other description of historians, who never assign 
any act of politicians to a good motive. These gentle 
historians, on the contrary, dip their pens in nothing but 
the milk of human kindness. 54 They seek no further for 
merit than the preamble 55 of a patent, or the inscription 
on a tomb. With them every man created a peer is first 
an hero ready made. They judge of every man's capacity 
for office by the offices he has filled ; and the more offices 
the more ability. Every general officer with them is a 
Marlborough ; 56 every statesman a Burleigh ; 57 every 
judge a Murray 58 or a Yorke. They, who alive, were 
laughed at or pitied by all their acquaintance, make as 
good a figure as the best of them in the pages of Guillim, 59 
Edmonson, and Collins. To these recorders, so full of 
good nature to the great and prosperous, I would willingly 
leave the first Baron Russell, and Earl of Bedford, and 



64 " Yet I do fear thy nature ; 

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness 
To catch the nearest way." 

— Macbeth, Act I, Scene 5, lines 14-16. 

65 Did not Burke justify the Americans for going to war for a 
" preamble " ? Of a different complexion, however. 

6li The great Captain General of the English forces — the victor 
at Blenheim. 

67 Robert Cecil, " the one minister in whom Queen Elizabeth 
really confided." — Green. 

os Justice Lord Mansfield. — " How sweet an Ovid was in Murray 
lost ! " 

59 Writers in Heraldry, 



EDMUND BURKE 389 

the merits of his grants. But the aulnager, 60 the weigher, 
the meter of grants, will not suffer us to acquiesce in the 
judgment of the prince reigning at the time when they 
were made. They are never good to those who earn them. 
Well then ; since the new grantees have war made on 
them by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is 
not to be taken, let us turn our eyes to history, in which 
great men have always a pleasure in contemplating the 
heroic origin of their house. 

40 The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the 
grants, was a Mr. Russell, a person of an ancient gentle- 
man's family, raised by being a minion of Henry the 
Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of char- 
acter to create these relations, the favorite was in all likeli- 
hood much such another as his master. The first of those 
immoderate grants was not taken from the ancient de- 
mesne of the crown, but from the recent confiscation of 
the ancient nobility of the land. The lion, having sucked 
the blood of his prey, threw the offal carcass to the 
jackal in waiting. Having tasted once the food of con- 
fiscation, the favorites became fierce and ravenous. This 
worthy favorite's first grant was from the lay nobility. 
The second, infinitely improving on the enormity of the 
first, was from the plunder of the church. In truth, his 
Grace is somewhat excusable for his dislike to a grant 
like mine, not only in its quantity, but in its kind, so 
different from his own. 

41 Mine was from a mild and benevolent sovereign; his 
from Henry the Eighth. 

42 Mine had not its fund in the murder of any innocent 
person of illustrious rank, or in the pillage of any body 

60 Measurer by the ell. 



39© A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

of unoffending men. 61 His grants were from the aggre- 
gate and consolidated funds of judgments iniquitously 
legal, and from possessions voluntarily surrendered by 
the lawful proprietors with the gibbet at their door. 

43 The merit of the grantee whom he derives from was 
that of being a prompt and greedy instrument of a level- 
ing tyrant, who oppressed all descriptions of his people, 
but who fell with particular fury on everything that was 
great and noble. Mine has been in endeavoring to screen 
every man, in every class, from oppression, and particu- 
larly in defending the high and eminent, who, in the bad 
times of confiscating princes, confiscating chief govern- 
ors, or confiscating demagogues, are the most exposed 
to jealousy, avarice, and envy. 

44 The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pen- 
sion was in giving his hand to the work, and partaking 
the spoil, with a prince who plundered a part of the 
national church of his time and country. Mine was in 
defending the whole of the national church of my own 
time and my own country, and the whole of the national 
churches of all countries, from the principles and the 
examples, which lead to ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a 
contempt of all prescriptive titles, thence to the pillage of 
all property, and thence to universal desolation. 

45 The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in 
being a favorite and chief adviser to a prince who left no 
liberty to their native country. My endeavor was to obtain 
liberty for the municipal country in which I was born, 62 
and for all descriptions and denominations in it. Mine 



61 Alluding to Buckingham, and to the destruction of the mon- 
asteries. 

62 Ireland. 



EDMUND BURKE 391 

was to support with unrelaxing vigilance every right, 
every privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my 
dearer, and more comprehensive country; and not only 
to preserve those rights in this chief seat of empire, but 
in every nation, in every land, in every climate, language, 
and religion, in the vast domain that still is under the 
protection, and the larger that was once under the pro- 
tection of the British crown. 

46 His founder's merits were, by arts in which he served 
his master and made his fortune, to bring poverty, wretch- 
edness, and depopulation on his country. Mine were 
under a benevolent prince, in promoting the commerce, 
manufactures, and agriculture of his kingdom), — in 
which his Majesty shows an eminent example, who even 
in his amusement is a patriot, and in hours of leisure an 
improver of his native soil. 

47 His founder's merit was the merit of a gentleman 
raised by the arts of a court and the protection of a Wol- 
sey 63 to the eminence of a great and potent lord. His 
merit in that eminence was, by instigating a tyrant to in- 
justice, to provoke a people to rebellion. My merit was, 
to awaken the sober part of «the country, that they might 
put themselves on their guard against any one potent 
lord, or any greater number of potent lords, or any com- 
bination of great leading men of any sort, if ever they 
should attempt to proceed in the same courses, but in the 
reverse order, — that is, by instigating a corrupted popu- 
lace to rebellion, and, through that rebellion, introducing 

83 " In full-blown dignity see Wolsey stand, 

Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand, — 

To him the church, the realm, their powers consign, 

Through him the rays of regal bounty shine." 

— Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes. 



392 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

a tyranny yet worse than the tyranny which his Grace's 
ancestor supported, and of which he profited in the man- 
ner we behold in the despotism of Henry the Eighth. 
48 The political merit of the first pensioner of his Grace's 
house, was that of being concerned as a counselor of state 
in advising, and in his person executing the conditions 
of a dishonorable peace with France; the surrendering 
the fortress of Boulogne, 64 then our out-guard on the 
continent. By that surrender, Calais, 65 the key of France, 
and the bridle in the mouth of that power, was, not many 
years afterward finally lost. 66 My merit has been in 
resisting the power and pride of France, under any form 
of its rule; but in opposing it with the greatest zeal and 
earnestness, when that rule appeared in the worst form it 
could assume; the worst indeed which the prime cause 
and principle of all evil could possibly give it. It was 
my endeavor by every means to excite a spirit in the 
House, where I had the honor of a seat, for carrying 
on with early vigor and decision, the most clearly just 
and necessary war, that this or any nation ever carried 
on ; in order to save my country from the iron yoke of 
its power, and from the more dreadful contagion of its 
principles ; to preserve, while they can be preserved, pure 
and untainted, the ancient, inbred integrity, piety, good 



64 Taken by Henry VIII., but surrendered in a few years. 

65 Starved into surrender to Edward III. in 1347, and for over 
two hundred years held to be " the brightest jewel in the English 
crown." 

68 For this loss, Queen Mary knew no consolation. 
" Queen Mary's saying serves for me 
(When fortune's malice 
Lost her, Calais) — 
Open my heart, and you will see 
Graved inside of it, ' Italy.' " — . 



EDMUND BURKE 393 

nature, and good humor of the people of England, from 
the dreadful pestilence which beginning in France, threat- 
ens to lay waste the whole moral, and in a great degree 
the whole physical world, having done both in the focus 
of its most intense malignity. 

49 The labors of his Grace's founder merited the curses, 67 
not loud but deep, of the Commons of England, on 
whom he and his master had effected a complete Parlia- 
mentary reform, by making them in their slavery and hu- 
miliation, the true and adequate representatives of a 
debased, degraded, and undone people. My merits were, 
in having had an active, though not always an obstenta- 
tious° share, in every one act, without exception, of undis- 
puted constitutional utility in my time, and in having sup- 
ported on all occasions, the authority, and efficiency, and 
the privileges of the Commons of Great Britain. I ended 
my services by a recorded and fully reasoned assertion on 
their own journals of their constitutional rights, and a 
vindication of their constitutional conduct. I labored in 
all things to merit their inward approbation, and (along 
with the assistance of the largest, and greatest, and best 
of my endeavors) I received their free, unbiased, public, 
and solemn thanks. 

50 Thus stands the account of the comparative merits 
of the Crown grants which compose the Duke of Bed- 
ford's fortune as balanced against mine. In the name of 
common sense, why should the Duke of Bedford think 
that none but of the House of Russell are entitled to the 



07 " And that which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends, 
I must not look to have ; but, in their stead, 
Curses, not loud, but deep." 

— Macbeth. Act V. Scene ,?. 



394 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

favor of the Crown. Why should he imagine that no 
king of England has been capable of judging of merit but 
King Henry the Eighth? Indeed, he will pardon me, he 
is a little mistaken: all virtue did not end in the first 
Earl of Bedford ; all discernment did not lose its vision 
when his creator closed his eyes. Let him remit his 
rigor on the disproportion between merit and reward in 
others, and they will make no inquiry into the origin of 
his fortune. They will regard with much more satisfac- 
tion, as he will contemplate with infinitely more advan- 
tage, whatever in his pedigree has been dulcified by an 
exposure to the influence of heaven in a long flow of gen- 
erations from the hard, acidulous, metallic tincture, of the 
spring. It is little to be doubted that several of his fore- 
fathers in that long series have degenerated 68 into honor 
and virtue. Let the Duke of Bedford (I am sure he will) 
reject with scorn and horror, the counsels of the lecturers, 
those wicked panders to avarice and ambition, who would 
tempt him in che troubles of his country, to seek another 
enormous fortune from the forfeitures of another nobility, 
and the plunder of another church. Let him (and I trust 
that yet he will) employ all the energy of his youth, and 
all the resources of his wealth, to crush rebellious prin- 
ciples which have no foundation in morals, and rebellious 
movements, that have no provocation in tyranny. 
51 Then will be forgot the rebellions, which, by a doubt- 
ful priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extin- 
guished. On such a conduct in the noble Duke, many of 
his countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give 
way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and in the dash- 

88 " The rest to some faint meaning make pretense, 
But Shadwell never deviates into sense." 

— Dryden's Mac Flecknoe, lines IQ and 20. 



EDMUND BURKE 395 

ing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that if 
the fates had found no other way in which they could 
give a Duke of Bedford and his opulence as props to a 
tottering world, then the butchery of the Duke of Buck- 
ingham 69 might be tolerated ; it might be regarded even 
with complacency, whilst in the heir 70 of confiscation they 
saw the sympathizing comforter of the martyrs, who 
suffer under the cruel confiscation of this day ; whilst they 
beheld with admiration his zealous protection of the vir- 
tuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manly sup- 
port of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry 
of his native land. Then his Grace's merit would be pure 
and new, and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honor. As 
he pleased he might reflect honor on his predecessors, or 
throw it forward on those who weft to succeed him. He 
might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the 
root of it, as he thought proper. 

52 Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of 
succession, I should have been, according to my medioc- 
rity and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of 
founder of a family : I should have left a son, who, in all 
the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in 
science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in 
generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and 
every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown 
himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of 
those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon 
would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that 
provision which belonged more to mine than to me. He 
would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symme- 



89 Read Henry VIII. , Act II, Scene i. 
70 Bedford. 



396 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

trized every disproportion. It would not have been for 
that successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir 
of merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a 
salient, living spring of generous and manly action. 
Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty 
of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he 
had received. He was made a public creature, and had 
no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some 
duty. At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man 
is not easily supplied. 

53 But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, 
and whose wisdom it behooves us not at all to dispute, 
has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my 
querulous weakness might suggest) a far better. The 
storm has gone over fne ; and I lie like one of those old 
oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. 
I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the 
roots, and lie prostrate on the earth. There, and pros- 
trate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the divine jus- 
tice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I 
humble myself before God, I do not know that it is for- 
bidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate 
men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After some of 
the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he sub- 
mitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But 
even so I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and 
with a considerable degree of verbal asperity , those ill- 
natured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to read 
moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. 
I am alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the 
gate. 71 Indeed, my lord, I greatly deceive myself if in 

71 "As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man ; so are children 



EDMUND BURKE 397 

this hard season 72 I would give a peck of refuse wheat 
for all that is called fame and honor in the world. This 
is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privi- 
lege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease. 
But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are 
made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and disease. It 
is an instinct ; and under the direction of reason, instinct 
is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They 
who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me. 
They who should have been to me as posterity are in the 
place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest relation (which 
ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he 
would have performed to me : I owe it to him to show 
that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would 
have it, from an unworthy parent. 

54 The Crown has considered me after long service : the 
Crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance. He 
has had a long credit for any service which he may per- 
form hereafter. He is secure, and long may he be secure, 
in his advance, whether he performs any services or not. 
But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that 
Constitution which secures his own utility or his own 
insignificance, or how he discourages those who take up 
even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like 
the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the 
worthless. His grants are engrafted on the public law of 
Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable 
ages. They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescrip- 



of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them : 
they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with [subdue] the 
enemies in the gate." — Psalm 127. 

12 A period of great distress in England, 



398 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

tion 73 found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from 
which the jejuneness and penury ° of our municipal law 
has by degrees been enriched and strengthened. This 
prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bring- 
ing to its perfection. The Duke of Bedford will stand 
as long as prescriptive ° law endures — as long as the 
great, stable laws of property, common to us with all 
civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without 
the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims, princi- 
ples, or precedents of the grand Revolution. They are 
secure against all changes but one. The whole Revolu- 
tionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, 
comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very 
reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws 
on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the gov- 
ernments of the world. The learned professors of the 
rights of man regard prescription not as a title to bar all 
claim set up against old possession, but they look on pre- 
scription as itself a bar against the possessor and pro- 
prietor. 74 They hold an immemorial possession to be no 
more than a long-continued, and therefore an aggravated 
injustice. 

55 Such are their ideas, such their religion, and such their 
law. But as to our country, and our race, as long as the 
well-compacted structure of our church and state, the 
sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended 
by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and 
a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British 
Sion — as long as the British monarchy, not more limited 

73 Title based upon immemorial use. 

71 That instead of " nine points," possession is not a single 
point. 



EDMVMD BURKE 399 

than fenced by the orders of the State, shall, like the 
proud Keep 75 of Windsor, rising in the majesty of pro- 
portion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and 
coeval towers — as long as this awful structure shall 
oversee and guard the subjected land, so long the mounds 
and dikes of the low, fat Bedford level 76 will have 
nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levelers 
of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and 
his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm, 
— the triple cord which no man can break, — the solemn, 
sworn, constitutional frank-pledge° of this nation, the 
firm guarantees of each other's being and each other's 
rights, the joint and several securities, each in its place 
and order, for every kind and every quality of property 
and of dignity, — as long as these endure, so long the 
Duke of Bedford is safe, and we are all safe together, the 
high from the blights of envy and the spoliations of 
rapacity, the low from the iron hand of oppression and 
the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen ! and so be it, and 
so it will be, — 

" Dum domus Aenese Capitoli immobile saxum 
Accolet, imperiumque pater Romanus habebit." 77 

56 But if the rude inroad of Gallic tumult, with its so- 
phistical rights of man to falsify the account, and its 
sword as a make-weight to throw into the scale, shall be 
introduced into our city by a misguided populace, set on 
by proud, great men, themselves blinded and intoxicated 



75 Castle. 

70 This family has reclaimed an immense extent of marsh land. 

77 " While the house of yEneas shall dwell near the immovable 
rock of the Capitol, and the Roman shall hold the reins of govern- 
ment." 



46o A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

by a frantic ambition, we shall all of us perish and be 
overwhelmed in a common ruin. If a great storm blow on 
pur coast, it will cast the whales on the strand, as well 
as the periwinkles. His Grace will not survive the poor 
grantee he despises — no, not for a twelvemonth. If the 
great look for safety in the services they render to this 
Gallic cause, it is to be foolish even above the weight of 
privilege allowed to wealth. If his Grace be one of those 
whom they endeavor to proselytize, he ought to be aware 
of the character of the sect whose doctrines he is invited 
to embrace. With them insurrection is the most sacred 
of revolutionary duties to the state. Ingratitude to bene- 
factors is the first of revolutionary virtues. Ingratitude 
is, indeed, their four cardinal virtues compacted and 
amalgamated into one; and he will find it in everything 
that has happened since the commencement of the philo- 
sophic Revolution to this hour. If he pleads the merit 
of having performed the duty of insurrection against the 
order he lives in, — God forbid he ever should ! — the 
merit of others will be to perform the duty of insurrection 
against him. If he pleads — again God forbid he should ! 
and I do not suspect he will — his ingratitude to the 
crown for its creation of his family, others will plead their 
right and duty to pay him in kind. They will laugh, 
indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax. 
His deeds will be drawn out with the rest of the lumber 
of his evidence-room, and burnt to the tune of Qa ira 78 
in the courts of Bedford (then Equality) House. 
57 Am I to blame, if I attempt to pay his Grace's hostile 
reproaches to me with a friendly admonition to himself? 

78 A revolutionary song in Paris. It is said that Franklin gave it 
much vogue. 



EDMUND BURKE 40 1 

Can I be blamed, for pointing out to him in what manner 
he is like to be affected, if the sect of the cannibal philoso- 
phers of France should proselytize any considerable part 
of this people, and, by their joint proselytizing arms, 
should conquer that government, to which his Grace 
does not seem to me to give all the support his own 
security demands? Surely it is proper, that he, and that 
others like him, should know the true genius of this sect ; 
what their opinions are ; what they have done ; and to 
whom; and what (if a prognostic is to be formed from 
the dispositions and actions of men) it is certain they 
will do hereafter. He ought to know, that they have 
sworn assistance, the only engagement they ever will 
keep, to all in this country, who bear a resemblance to 
themselves, and who think as such, that The whole duty 
of man 70 consists in destruction. They are a misallied 
and disparaged branch of the house of Nimrod. 80 They 
are the Duke of Bedford's natural hunters, and he is 
their natural game. Because he is not very profoundly 
reflecting, he sleeps in profound security : they, on the 
contrary, are always vigilant, active, enterprising, and 
though far removed from any knowledge, which makes 
men estimable or useful, in all the instruments and re- 
sources of evil, their leaders are not meanly instructed, 
or insufficiently furnished. In the French revolution 
everything is new ; and, from want of preparation to 
meet so unlooked-for an evil, everything is dangerous. 
Never, before this time, was a set of literary men, con- 



70 The title of a book once much read. 

80 " He was a mighty hunter before the Lord ; wherefore it is 
said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord." — 
Genesis 10 : p. 

26 



402 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

verted into a gang of robbers and assassins. Never be- 
fore, did a den of bravoes and banditti, assume the garb 
and tone of an academy of philosophers. 
58 Let me tell his Grace, that an union of such characters, 
monstrous as it seems, is not made for producing despic- 
able enemies. But if they are formidable as foes, as 
friends they are dreadful indeed. The men of property 
in France confiding in a force, which seemed to be irre- 
sistible, because it had never been tried, neglected to 
prepare for a conflict with their enemies at their own 
weapons. They were found in such a situation as the 
Mexicans were, when they were attacked by the dogs, 
the cavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of a handful of 
bearded men, 81 whom they did not know to exist in nature. 
This is a comparison that some, I think, have made; 
and it is just. In France they had their enemies within 
their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of 
them. But they had not sagacity to discern their savage 
character. They seemed tame, and even caressing. They 
had nothing but douce humanite 82 in their mouth. They 
could not bear the punishment of the mildest laws on 
the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice 
made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed 
in the world disturbed their repose. Military glory was 
no more, with them, than a splendid infamy. Hardly 
would they hear of self-defense, which they reduced 
within such bounds, as to leave it no defense at all. All 
this while they meditated the confiscations and massacres 
we have seen. Had any one told these unfortunate noble- 
men and gentlemen, how, and by whom, the grand fabric 



61 Under " stout Cortez." 

82 Sweet humanity — human kindness. 



EDMUND BURKE 403 

of the French monarchy under which they flourished 
would be subverted, they would not have pitied him as 
a visionary, but would have turned from him as what 
they call a mauvais plaisant. 83 Yet we have seen what 
has happened. The persons who have suffered from the 
cannibal philosophy of France, are so like the Duke of 
Bedford, that nothing but his Grace's probably not speak- 
ing quite so good French, could enable us to find out any 
difference. A great many of them had as pompous titles 
as he, and were of full as illustrious a race : some few of 
them had fortunes as ample; several of them, without 
meaning the least disparagement to the Duke of Bedford, 
were as wise, and as virtuous, and as valiant, and as well 
educated, and as complete in all the lineaments of men of 
honor as he is. And to all this they had added the 
powerful out-guard of a military profession, which, in 
its nature, renders men somewhat more cautious than 
those who have nothing to attend to but the lazy enjoy- 
ment of undisturbed possessions. But security 8i was 
their ruin. They are dashed to pieces in the storm, and 
our shores are covered with the wrecks. If they had been 
aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never 
could have happened. 

59 I assure his Grace, that if I state to him the designs of 
his enemies in a manner which may appear to him ludi- 
crous and impossible, I tell him nothing that has not 
exactly happened, point by point, but twenty-four miles 
from our own shore. I assure him that the Frenchified 
faction, more encouraged than others are warned by what 



a bad pleasant ; i. e., a social nuisance or practical joker. 
" And you all know security (without care) 
Is mortal's chiefest enemy." — Macbeth, Act III, Scene 5. 



404 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

has happened in France, look at him and his landed 
possessions as an object at once of curiosity and rapacity. 
He is made for them in every part of their double char- 
acter. As robbers, to them he is a noble booty ; as specu- 
latists, he is a glorious subject for their experimental 
philosophy. He affords matter for an extensive analysis 
in all the branches of their science, geometrical, physical, 
civil, and political. These philosophers are fanatics. 
Independent of any interest, which, if it operated alone, 
would make them much more tractable, they are carried 
with such a headlong rage towards every desperate trial, 
that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the 
slightest of their experiments. I am better able to enter 
into the character of this description of men than the 
noble Duke can be. I have lived long and variously in 
the world. Without any considerable pretensions to lit- 
erature in myself, I have aspired to the love of letters. I 
have lived for a great many years in habitudes 85 with 
those who professed them. I can form a tolerable esti- 
mate of what is likely to happen from a character chiefly 
dependent for fame and fortune on knowledge and talent, 
as well in its morbid and perverted state as in that which 
is sound and natural. Naturally men so formed and fin- 
ished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But 
when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which 
was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, 
which is now the case, and when in that state they come 
to understand one another, and to act in corps, a more 
dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell 86 to scourge 

85 relations. 

88 " Not in the legions 

Of horrid hell can come a devil more damn'd 

In evils to top Macbeth." — Macbeth, Act IV, Scene 3. 



EDMUND BURKE 405 

mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the 
heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes nearer 
to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty 
and passion of a man. It is like that of the Principle of 
Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, 
defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate hu- 
manity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls 
the " compunctious visitings of nature " will sometimes 
knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous 
speculations. 87 But they have a means of compounding 
with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved : they 
only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to de- 
clare that they do not think two thousand years too long 
a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable 
that they never see any way to their projected good but 
by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not 
fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering 
through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries 
of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their 
horizon, and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. 
The geometricians and the chemists bring — the one from 
the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the 
soot of their furnaces — dispositions that make them 
worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes 
which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is 
come upon them suddenly ; they are intoxicated with it, 
and it has rendered them fearless of the danger which 
may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These 
philosophers consider men in their experiments no more 
than they do mice in an air-pump, or in a recipient of 



Thou hast no speculation in those eyes 

Which thou dost glare with." — Macbeth, Act III, Scene 4. 



4 o6 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, 
they look upon him, and everything that belongs to him, 
with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of 
that little, long-tailed animal that has been long the game 
of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet- 
pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two 
legs or upon four. 

60 His Grace's landed possessions are irresistibly inviting 
to an agrarian experiment. They are a downright insult 
upon the rights of man. They are more extensive than 
the territory of many of the Grecian republics, and they 
are, without comparison, more fertile than most of them. 
There are now republics in Italy, in Germany, and in 
Switzerland which do not possess anything like so fair 
and ample a domain. There is scope for seven philoso- 
phers to proceed in their analytical experiments upon 
Harrington's 88 seven different forms of republics in the 
acres of this one duke. Hitherto they have been wholly 
unproductive to speculation, fitted for nothing but to 
fatten bullocks, and to produce grain for beer, still more 
to stupefy the dull English understanding. Abbe Sieyes 89 
has whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions ready 
made, ttcketed, sorted, and numbered, suited to every 
season and every fancy ; some with the top of the pattern 
at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top ; some 
plain, some flowered; some distinguished for their sim- 
plicity, others for their complexity ; some of blood color, 
some of boue de Paris; 90 some with directories, others 

83 Author of Oceana, a work descriptive of an ideal form of 
government. 

69 One of the most prominent leaders, by his writings, of the 
French Revolution. A Jesuit in high office, he abjured his title. 

80 Paris dirt. 



EDMUND BURKE 407 

without a direction; some with councils of elders and 
councils of youngsters, some without any council at all; 
some where the electors choose the representatives, others 
where the representatives choose the electors; some in 
long coats, some in short cloaks ; some with pantaloons, 
some without breeches ; some with five-shilling qualifica- 
tions, some totally unqualified. So that no constitution- 
fancier may go unsuited from his shop, provided he loves 
a pattern of pillage, oppression, arbitrary imprisonment, 
confiscation, exile, revolutionary judgment, and legalized, 
premeditated murder, in any shapes into which they can 
be put. What a pity it is that the progress of experi- 
mental philosophy should be checked by his Grace's 
monopoly ! Such are their sentiments, I assure him ; 
such is their language, when they dare to speak ; and 
such are their proceedings, when they have the means to 
act. 

6 1 Their geographers, and geometricians, have been some 
time out of practice. It is some time since they have 
divided their own country into squares. That figure has 
lost the charms of its novelty. They want new lands 
for new trials. It is not only the geometricians of the 
republic that find him a good subject, the chemists have 
bespoke him after the geometricians have done with him. 
As the first set have an eye in his Grace's lands, the 
chemists are not less taken with his buildings. They 
consider mortar as a very anti-revolutionary invention in 
its present state; but properly employed, an admirable 
material for overturning all establishments. They have 
found that the gunpowder of ruins is far the fittest for 
making other ruins, and so ad infinitum. They have cal- 
culated what quantity of matter convertible into niter 



408 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

is to be found in Bedford House, in Woburn Abbey, and 
in what his Grace and his trustees have still suffered 
to stand of that foolish royalist Inigo Jones, 91 in Covent 
Garden. Churches, play-houses, coffee-houses, all alike 
are destined to be mingled, and equalized, and blended 
into one common rubbish ; and well sifted, and lixiviated, 
to crystallize into true democratic explosive insurrection- 
ary niter. Their academy del Cimento (per antiphrasin) 92 
with Morveau and Hassenfrats at its head, have computed 
that the brave sans culottes may make war on all the aris- 
tocracy of Europe for a twelvemonth, out of the rubbish 
of the Duke of Bedford's buildings. 

62 While the Morveaux and Priestleys 93 are proceeding 
with these experiments upon the Duke of Bedford's 
houses, the Sieyes, and the rest of the analytical legisla- 
tors, and constitution-venders, are quite as busy in their 
trade of decomposing organization, in forming his Grace's 
vassals into primary assemblies, national guards, first, 
second, and third requisitioners, committees of research, 
conductors of the traveling guillotine, judges of revolu- 
tionary tribunals, legislative hangmen, supervisors of 
domiciliary visitation, exactors of forced loans, and as- 
sessors of the maximum. 

63 The din of all this smithery 94 may some time or other 
possibly wake this noble Duke, and push him to an 
endeavor to save some little matter from their experi- 
mental philosophy. If he pleads his grants from the 



81 A distinguished architect in the time of Queen Anne. 

82 Using a word in a sense opposite to its true one, as Cimento, 
ciment, cement, here meaning anything but a mode of uniting. 

83 Eminent chemists. 

84 hammering. — Sentence quoted in the International and Cen- 
tury dictionaries. 



EDMUND BURKE 409 

Crown, he is ruined at the outset. If he pleads he has 
received them from the pillage of superstitious corpora- 
tions, this indeed will stagger them a little, because they 
are enemies to all corporations, and to all religion. How- 
ever, they will soon recover themselves, and will tell his 
Grace, or his learned council, that all such property 
belongs to the nation; and that it would be more wise for 
him, if he wishes to live the natural term of a citizen (that 
is, according to Condorcet's 95 calculation, six months on 
an average), not to pass for an usurper upon the national 
property. This is what the Serjeants at law of the rights 
of man, will say to the puny apprentices of the common 
law of England. 

64 Is the genius of philosophy not yet known ? You may 
as well think the garden of the Tuilleries was well pro- 
tected with the cords of ribbon insultingly stretched by 
the national assembly to keep the sovereign canaille from 
intruding on the retirement of the poor king of the 
French, 96 as that such flimsy cobwebs will stand between 
the savages of the revolution and their natural prey. 
Deep philosophers are no triflers ; brave sans culottes are 
no formalists. They will no more regard a Marquis of 
Tavistock 97 than an Abbot of Tavistock ; the Lord of 
Woburn will not be more respectable in their eyes than 
the Prior of Woburn ; they will make no difference be- 
tween the superior of a Covent Garden of nuns and of a 
Covent Garden ° 8 of another description. They will not 
care a rush whether his coat is long or short; whether 

" 5 An eminent scholar and author. Member of the assembly that 
put to death Louis XVI. 
"Louis XVI. 

97 An earlier title of the Duke of Bedford. 
118 Here, an estate of Bedford's, 



4 i o A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

the color be purple or blue and buff. They will not 
trouble their heads, with what part of his head, his hair 
is cut from ; and they will look with equal respect on a 
tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of 
their Legendre," or some other of their legislative 
butchers, how he cuts up? 

65 Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the sans 
culottes carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the 
shambles are pricking their dotted lines upon his hide, 
and, like the print of the poor ox that we see in the shop 
windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking no 
harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, 
and briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, 
boiling, and stewing, that all the while they are measuring 
him, his Grace is measuring me — in invidiously compar- 
ing the bounty of the Crown with the deserts of the de- 
fender of his order, and in the same moment fawning on 
those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor 
innocent ! — 

" Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood." 10 ° 

66 No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and 
suffer with resignation what Providence pleases to com- 
mand or inflict ; but indeed, they are sharp incommodities 
which beset old age. 101 It was but the other day, that, 
on putting in order some things which had been brought 
here, on my taking leave of London forever, I looked 
over a number of fine portraits, most of them of persons 

88 A geometrician whose work was once much used as a text in 
this country. 
100 Pope. 
101 " Whatever poet, orator, or sage 

May say of it, old age is still old age." — Longfellow, 



EDMUND BURKE 411 

now dead, but whose society, in my better days, made 
this a proud and happy place. Amongst these was the 
picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist 102 
worthy of the subject, the excellent friend of that excel- 
lent man from their earliest youth, and a common friend 
of us both, with whom we lived for many years without 
a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of 
jar, to the day of our final separation. 
67 I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest 
and best men of his age ; and I loved and cultivated him 
accordingly. He was much in my heart, and I believe I 
was in his to the very last beat. It was after his trial 103 
at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what 
zeal and anxious affection I attended him through that 
his agony of glory, what part my son took in the early 
flush and enthusiasm of his virtue, and the pious passion 
with which he attached himself to all my connections, with 
what prodigality we both squandered ourselves in court- 
ing almost every sort of enmity for his sake, I believe he 
felt, just as I should have felt such friendship on such an 
occasion. I partook indeed of this honor, with several of 
the first, and best, and ablest in the kingdom, but I was 
behindhand with none of them ; and I am sure, that if to 
the eternal disgrace of this nation, and to the total anni- 
hilation of every trace of honor and virtue in it, things 
had taken a different turn from what they did, I should 
have attended him to the quarter-deck 104 with no less 



102 Reynolds. 

103 For his conduct of the English fleet in a fight with the French 
in 1778. He was acquitted, and received the thanks of Parliament. 

104 For execution? Richard Parker, a leading spirit in a mutiny 
in the British navy, was tried by court-martial and condemned. " He 
was executed on board the Sandwich." — Miller. 



412 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

good will and more pride, though with far other feelings 
than I partook of the general flow of national joy that 
attended the justice that was done to his virtue. 

68 Pardon, my lord, the feeble garrulity of age, which 
loves to diffuse itself in discourse of the departed great. 
At my years, we live in retrospect alone, and, wholly 
unfitted for the society of vigorous life, we enjoy — the 
best balm to all wounds — the consolation of friendship, 
in those only whom we have lost forever. Feeling the 
loss of Lord Keppel at all times, at no time did I feel it 
so much as on the first day when I was attacked in the 
House of Lords. 

69 Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in 
its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his 
nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him 
that the favor of that gracious Prince 105 who had honored 
his virtues with the government of the navy of Great 
Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of 
his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend 106 
of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion 
and counsellor under his rudest trials. He would have 
told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might 
be becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred. 
He would have told him, that when men in that rank 
lose decorum, they lose everything. 

70 On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel; but the 
public loss of him in this awful crisis — ! I speak from 
much knowledge of the person, he never would have 
listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this 
sans culotterie of France. His goodness of heart, his 

105 George III. 
100 Burke. 



EDMUND BURKE 413 

reason, his taste, his public duty, his principles, his preju- 
dices, would have repelled him forever from all connec- 
tion with that horrid medley of madness, vice, impiety, 
and crime. 

71 Lord Keppel had two countries, one of descent, and 
one of birth. Their interest and their glory are the same, 
and his mind was capacious of both. His family was 
noble, and it was Dutch ; that is, he was of the oldest and 
purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people 
renowned above all others for love of their native land. 
Though it was never shown in insult to any human being, 
Lord Keppel was something high. It was a wild stock 
of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted 
the milder virtues. He valued ancient nobility; and he 
was not disinclined to augment it with new honors. He 
valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for 
inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity. 
He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a 
narrow mind ; conceiving that a man born in an elevated 
place, in himself was nothing, but everything in what 
went before, and what was to come after him. Without 
much speculation, but by the sure instinct of ingenuous 
feelings, and by the dictates of plain unsophisticated nat- 
ural understanding, he felt, that no great commonwealth 
could by any possibility long subsist, without a body of 
some kind or other of nobility, decorated with honor, and 
fortified by privilege. This nobility forms the chain that 
connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with Mr. 
Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can 
bind another. He felt that no political fabric could be 
well made without some such order of things as might, 
through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing 



414 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state. 
He felt that nothing else can protect it against the 
levity of courts, and the greater levity of the multitude. 
That to talk of hereditary monarchy without anything 
else of hereditary reverence in the commonwealth, was a 
low-minded absurdity ; fit only for those detestable " fools 
aspiring to be knaves," who began to forge in 1789, the 
false money of the French constitution. — That it is one 
fatal objection to all new fancied and new fabricated re- 
publics (among a people, who, once possessing such an 
advantage, have wickedly and insolently rejected it), that 
the prejudice of an old nobility is a thing that cannot 
be made. It may be improved, it may be corrected, it 
may be replenished : men may be taken from it, or aggre- 
gated to it, but the thing itself is matter of inveterate 
opinion, and therefore cannot be matter of mere positive 
institution. He felt that this nobility in fact does not 
exist in wrong of other orders of the state, but by them, 
and for them. 

72 I knew the man I speak of ; and, if we can divine the 
future, out of what we collect from the past, no person 
living would look with more scorn and horror on the 
impious parricide committed on all their ancestry, and 
on the desperate attainder passed on all their posterity, 
by the Orleans, and the Roche foucaults, and the Fay- 
ettes, 107 and the Viscomtes de Noailles, and the false Peri- 
gords, and the long et caetera of the perfidious sans 
culottes of the court, who like demoniacs, possessed with 
a spirit of fallen pride, and inverted ambition, abdicated 



107 Americans have not gone to Burke for their estimate of the 
Fayette. 



EDMUND BURKE 41S 

their dignities, disowned their families, betrayed the most 
sacred of all trusts, and by breaking to pieces a great 
link of society, and all the cramps and holdings of the 
state, brought eternal confusion and desolation on their 
country. For the fate of the miscreant parricides them- 
selves he would have had no pity. Compassion for the 
myriads of men, of whom the world was not worthy, who 
by their means have perished in prisons, or on scaffolds, 
or are pining in beggary and exile, would leave no room 
in his, or in any well- formed mind, for any such sensa- 
tion. We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and 
the oppressed. 

73 Looking to his Batavian 108 descent, how could he bear 
to behold his kindred, the descendants of the brave nobil- 
ity of Holland, whose blood, prodigally poured out, had, 
more than all the canals, meers,° and inundations of their 
country, protected their independence, to behold them 
bowed in the basest servitude to the basest and vilest of 
the human race — in servitude to those who in no respect 
were superior in dignity, or could aspire to a better place 
than that of hangman to the tyrants to whose sceptered 
pride they had opposed an elevation of soul that sur- 
mounted and overpowered the loftiness of Castile, the 
haughtiness of Austria, and the overbearing arrogance 
of France! 

74 Could he with patience bear, that the children of that 
nobility, who would have deluged their country and given 
it to the sea, rather than submit to Louis XIV. who was 
then in his meridian glory, when his arms were conducted 
by the Turennes, 109 by the Luxembourgs, by the Boufflers ; 

108 Dutch. 

109 Royalist leaders. 



4i 6 A LETTER TO A ttOBLE LORD 

when his councils were directed by the Colberts, and the 
Louvois; when his tribunals were filled by the Lamoig- 
nons and the Daguesseaus — that these should be given 
up to the cruel sport of the Pichegrus, 110 the Jourdans, 
the Santerres, under the Rollands, and Brissots, and 
Goras, and Robespierres, the Reubels, the Carnots, and 
Talliens and Dantons, and the whole tribe of regicides, 
robbers, and revolutionary judges, that, from the rotten 
carcass of their own murdered country, have poured 
out innumerable swarms of the lowest, and at once the 
most destructive of the classes of animated nature, which 
like columns of locusts, have laid waste the fairest part 
of the world. 

75 Would Keppel have borne to see the ruin of the virtu- 
ous patricians, that happy union of the noble and the 
burgher, who, with signal prudence and integrity, had 
long governed the cities of the confederate republic, the 
cherishing fathers of their country, who, denying com- 
merce to themselves, made it flourish in a manner unex- 
ampled under their protection ? Could Keppel have borne 
that a vile faction should totally destroy this harmonious 
construction in favor of a robbing democracy founded on 
the spurious rights of man? 

76 He was no great clerk, but he was perfectly well 
versed in the interests of Europe ; and he could not have 
heard with patience that the country of Grotius, 111 the 
cradle of the law of nations, and one of the richest reposi- 
tories of all law, should be taught a new code by the 



110 Republican leaders. 

111 " A member of the States of Holland and the States-General, 
jurist, advocate, poet, scholar, historian, ... he stood famous 
among a crowd of famous contemporaries." — Motley's Bameveld. 



EDMUND BURKE 417 

ignorant flippancy of Thomas Paine, the presumptuous 
foppery of La Fayette, with his stolen rights of man in 
his hand, the wild, profligate intrigue and turbulency of 
Marat, and the impious sophistry of Condorcet in his 
insolent addresses to the Batavian Republic. 

77 Could Keppel, who idolized the House of Nassau, 112 
who was himself given to England along with the bless- 
ings of the British and Dutch Revolutions, with revolu- 
tions of stability, with revolutions which consolidated and 
married the liberties and the interests of the two nations 
forever — could he see the fountain of British liberty 
itself in servitude to France ? Could he see with patience 
a Prince of Orange expelled as a sort of diminutive des- 
pot, with every kind of contumely, from the country 113 
which that family of deliverers had so often rescued from 
slavery, and obliged to live in exile in another country, 114 
which owes its liberty to his house? 

78 Would Keppel have heard with patience, that the con- 
duct to be held on such occasions was to become short by 
the knees 115 to the faction of the homicides, to entreat 
them quietly to retire? or if the fortune of war should 
drive them from their first wicked and unprovoked inva- 
sion, that no security should be taken, no arrangement 
made, no barrier formed, no alliance entered into for the 
security of that, which under a foreign name 116 is the 
most precious part of England? What would he have 
said, if it was even proposed that the Austrian Nether- 



112 From which came William the Silent and William III. of 
England. 

1,3 Holland. 

"« England. 

m " Short by the knees, entreat for peace. ' — Swift. 

"•Hanover? 

37 



4i 8 A LETTER TO A NOBLE LORD 

lands (which ought to be a barrier to Holland, and the 
tie of an alliance, to protect her against any species of 
rule that might be erected, or even be restored in France) 
should be formed into a republic under her influence, and 
dependent upon her power? 

79 But, above all, what would he have said if he had 
heard it made a matter of accusation against me by his 
nephew, the Duke of Bedford, that I was the author of 
the war? Had I a mind to keep that high distinction to 
myself (as from pride I might, but from justice I dare 
not), he would have snatched his share of it from my 
hand, and held it with the grasp of a dying convulsion 
to his end. 117 

80 It would be a most arrogant presumption in me to 
assume to myself the glory of what belongs to his Maj- 
esty, and to his ministers, and to his Parliament, and 
to the far greater majority of his faithful people; but, 
had I stood alone to counsel, and that all were determined 
to be guided by my advice, and to follow it implicitly, 
then I should have been the sole author of a war. But 
it should have been a war on my ideas and my principles. 
However, let his Grace think as he may of my demerits 
with regard to the war with Regicide, he will find my 
guilt confined to that alone. He never shall, with the 
smallest color of reason, accuse me of being the author 
of a peace with Regicide. But that is high matter, and 
ought not to be mixed with anything of so little moment 
as what may belong to me, or even to the Duke of 
Bedford. 

I have the honor to be, etc., 

Edmund Burke. 



217 Sir Edward Keppel is to-day (1902) the senior rear admiral 
of the world's navies. 




JOHN MILTON 



JOHN MILTON. 

1 608- 1 674. 

Milton ! thou shouldst be living at this hour ; 
England hath need of thee. She is a fen 
Of stagnant waters; altar, sword, and pen, 
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower, 
Have forfeited their ancient English dower 
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men; 
O, raise us up, return to us again, 
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power ! 
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart ; 
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea : 
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free; 
So didst thou travel on life's common way 
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart 
The lowliest duties on herself did lay. 

— Wordsworth. 
"Are the noblest minds moody and mournful as Dante 
is described to have been ? Rather they : 

' bate no jot 
Of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer 
Right onward ? ' 
" Thus did John Milton, whom with Mr. Landor I 
cannot help honoring and admiring above any other poet 
of past times except Shakespeare." — Coleridge. 

" We owe the great writers of the golden age of our 
literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind 
which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form 
of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress 
and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton 

421 



422 JOHN MILTON 

was, be it remembered, a republican and a bold inquirer 
into morals and religion." — Shelley. 

"If you scruple to give the title of ^n epic poem to 
the Paradise Lost of Milton, call it, if you choose, a Di- 
vine poem; give it whatever name you please, provided 
you confess that it is a work as admirable in its kind as 
the Iliad." — Addison. 

In Mr. Lowell's essay on Milton, in Among My 
Books, there is a passage giving our American critic's 
opinion in a comparative way of certain poets' skill in 
constructing blank-verse. Lowell thought that Milton's 
long practice in prose, English and Latin " helped him to 
give that variety of pause and that majestic harmony to 
his blank-verse which have made it so unapproachably 
his own. Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have thought 
in Latin, has caught somewhat more than others of the 
dignity of his gait, but without his length of stride. 
Wordsworth, at his finest, has perhaps approached it, 
but with how long an interval ! Bryant has not seldom 
attained to its serene equanimity but never emulates its 
pomp. Keats has caught something of its large utter- 
ance, but altogether fails of its nervous severity of phrase. 
Cowper's muse (that moved with such graceful ease in 
slippers) becomes stiff when (in his translation of 
Homer) she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of Milton." 

I do not believe that it will spoil for our readers 
the specimen of Milton's handiwork about to be presented, 
should I quote here from Dr. Johnson's Lives of the 
Poets his exceedingly sour characterization thereof. The 
space given to Milton is forty pages in fine type. It 
is well worth the reading, and will stimulate the reader's 
independence of judgment. We must carry with us the 



JOHN MILTON 423 

fact that Milton was a rebel against Charles I. and wrote 
a treatise justifying his death by the headsman's axe, 
and that Johnson was a tory of tories. Indeed, strangely 
apropos, there lies a magazine upon my table an article 
in which presents ground for a presumption that John- 
son's loyalty caused him to tarry for a time in the 
camp of " Prince Charlie." But to return to what John- 
son said : — 

" One of the poems on which much praise has been 
bestowed is Lycidas; of which the diction is harsh, the 
rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What 
beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments 
and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion 
of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allu- 
sions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries 
from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and 
Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven 
heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief. 



" Such is the power of reputation justly acquired, that 
its blaze drives away the eye from nice examination. 
Sure no man could have fancied that he read Lycidas 
with pleasure, had he not known the author." 

In spite of the great lexicographer's adverse opinion 
so confidently expressed, the reading world will write 
" approved " beneath another opinion, copied from a life 
of Milton, 1836, author not named. 

" In 1645, was published a collection of his poems, 
the principal of which are On the Morning of Christ's 
Nativity, L' 'Allegro, II Penseroso, Lycidas, The Mask 
(Comus), etc., and if he had left no other monuments of 



424 JOHN MILTON 

his poetical genius behind him, these would have been 
sufficient to render his name immortal." 

In using either of our great dictionaries he whose eye 
is observant will be constantly coming upon lines of the 
five poems named and valued in the last paragraph. I 
believe that these classics are used more frequently than 
the same number of pages found anywhere else in our 
literature; chosen, I mean, by the lexicographer to show 
what words mean. Intimate acquaintance with such 
models cannot be too highly commended. 



Lycidas 1 



Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more 

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sear, 

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude 

And with forc'd fingers rude, 

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year. s 

Bitter constraint, and sad occasion dear, 

Compels 2 me to disturb your season due : 

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, 

Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. 

Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew, 3 I0 

Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. 

He must not float upon his wat'ry bier 

Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, 

Without the meed of some melodious tear. 

Begin then, Sisters 4 of the sacred well, 1S 

That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring. 
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. 
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse; 
So may some gentle Muse 

With lucky words favor my destin'd urn, 5 20 

And, as he passes, turn, 
And bid fair peace be to my sable shroud. 

1 A poetic name for Mr. Edward King, a college mate and 
intimate friend of Milton, who, on his voyage, 1637, to visit rela- 
tives in Ireland was drowned. 

2 It is three years since Milton has written a poem. He thinks 
himself now not ready, but this sad event demands it of him. 

3 King was a poet. 
* Muses. 

grave. " let him be regarded 

As the most noble corse that ever herald 
Did follow to his urn." — Coriolanus, Act V , Scene 6. 

425 



426 LYCIDAS 

For we were nurst upon the self-same hill, 

Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill. 

Together both, ere the high lawns 6 appear'd a s 

Under the opening eyelids 7 of the morn 
We drove afield, and both together heard 
What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn, 
Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night, 
Oft till the Star 8 that rose, at ev'ning, bright 30 

Toward Heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel. 
Meanwhile the rural ditties were not mute, 9 
Temper'd to th' oaten flute, 

Rough Satyrs danc'd, and Fauns with clov'n heel 
From the glad sound would not be absent long, 35 

And old Damsetas lov'd to hear our song. 

But O 10 the heavy change, now thou art gone, 
Now thou art gone, and never must return! 
Thee Shepherd, thee the woods, and desert caves 
With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown, *° 
And all their echoes mourn. 
The willows, and the hazel copses green, 
Shall now no more be seen, 
Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays. 
As killing as the canker to the rose, 4S 

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze, 
Or frost to flowers, that their gay wardrobe wear, 



8 open spaces in the woods. 

" To meet the sun upon the upland lawn." — Gray. 

7 If "jocund day" can "stand tiptoe," he can open his eyes. 

8 Jupiter, possibly, or some prominent star. 

9 We sang. Of course Milton and his friend were not singing 
" afield," but in their room, engaged either in work or recreation. 
" Fauns, etc.," are the other students or professors. 

10 But she is in her grave, and oh ! 
The difference to me ! — Wordsworth, 



JOHN MILTON 427 

When first the white-thorn blows ; 
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear. 

Where were ye, Nymphs, 11 when the remorseless 
deep 5 ° 

Clos'd o'er the head of your lov'd Lycidas? 
For neither were ye playing on the steep, 
Where your old Bards, the famous Druids, lie, 
Nor on the shaggy top of Mona high, 
Nor yet where Deva spreads her wizard stream : ss 
Ay me, I fondly 12 dream ! 

Had ye been there — for what could that have done ? 
What could the Muse herself, that Orpheus bore, 
The Muse herself, for her inchanting son, 
Whom universal nature did lament, 6o 

When by the rout 13 that made the hideous roar, 
His gory visage down the stream was sent, 
Down the swift Hebrus 14 to the Lesbian shore? 

Alas! what boots it with uncessant care 
To tend the homely slighted shepherd's trade, 15 6s 

And strictly meditate the thankless Muse? 
Were it not better done as others use, . 
To sport with Amaryllis 16 in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Nesera's 17 hair ? 
Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise 7 ° 

11 " Where wert thou mighty Mother, when he lay, 

When thy son lay, pierced by the shaft which flies 
In darkness ? where was lorn Urania 
When Adonais died ? " — Shelley. 
15 foolishly. " Fond impious man ! " — Gray. 

18 The Thracian women who tore Orpheus to pieces. His head 
was carried by the river to the sea, and thus reached the island of 
Lesbos. 

14 " Hebrum bibamus." — Virgil. 

15 In this pastoral, to write poetry. 

""The woods in Virgil's Eclogues resound with their names. 



428 LYCIDAS 

(That last infirmity of noble mind) 

To scorn delights, and live laborious days ; 

But the fair guerdon when we hope to find, 

And think to burst 18 out into sudden blaze, 

Comes the blind Fury with th' abhorred shears, ?s 

And slits the thin-spun life. " But not the praise," 

Phcebus replied, and touch'd my trembling ears'; 

" Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 

Nor in the glistering foil 

Set off to th' world, nor in broad rumor lies; 8o 

But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes, 

And perfe't witness of all- judging Jove; 

As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 

Of so much fame in Heav'n expect thy meed." 19 

O fountain Arethuse, and thou honor'd flood, 8s 

Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds 
That strain I heard 20 was of a higher mood ; 
But now my oat 21 proceeds, 
And listens to the Herald of the Sea 
That came in Neptune's plea ; 22 9 ° 

He ask'd the waves, and ask'd the felon 22a winds, 
What hard mishap hath doom'd this gentle swain? 
And question'd every gust 23 of rugged wings 
That blows from off each beaked promontory : 
They knew not of his story, 9S 

18 When we hope to find the fair reward, to " wake and find our- 
selves famous," then comes the Fury, etc. 

19 Hence " it were not better done, etc." — Line 66. 

20 from Phoebus-Apollo. 

21 Line 33. 

22 in Neptune's stead to conduct an inquiry, 
"a Why "felon"? 

23 every rude-winged gust. 

" The wind, 
Wing-weary with its long flight." — Whittier. 



JOHN MILTON 429 

And sage Hippotades 2i their answer brings, 

That not a blast was from his dungeon 25 stray'd ; 

The air was calm, and on the level brine 

Sleek Panope 2G with all her sisters play'd. 

It was that fatal and perfidious bark, 27 I0 ° 

Built in th' eclipse, and rigg'd with curses dark, 

That sunk so low that sacred head of thine. 

Next Camus, 28 reverend sire, went footing slow, 
His mantle hairy, and his bonnet sedge, 
Inwrought with figures dim, and on the edge I0S 

Like to that sanguine flow'r 29 inscrib'd with woe. 
Ah! Who hath reft (quoth he) my dearest pledge? 
Last came, and last did go, 
The Pilot 30 of the Galilean lake ; 

Two massy keys he bore of metals twain, II0 

(The golden opes, the iron shuts amain) 
He shook his mitered locks, and stern bespake; 
" How well could I have spar'd for thee, 31 young swain, 
Enow of such as for their bellies' sake 
Creep, and intrude, and climb into the fold? Ij s 

Of other care they little reck'ning make, 
Then how to scramble at the shearer's feast, 



24 .#lo1us, who jailed the winds in a vast cave. 

28 " In a cavern under is fettered the thunder." — Shelley. 

28 She that came from under the deep waves to answer the prayer 
of Cloanthus (JEneid V, line 240), and helped him win the great 
boat race. 

21 Are these lines part of yEolus's plea of not guilty? 

28 God of the Cam. 

29 The hyacinth. When Hyacinth was slain, his blood marked 
the herbage ; a flower arose, in shape like a lily, and Apollo, who 
was performing this miracle, wrote a note of woe upon the leaves. — 
Ovid. 

30 St. Peter. 

31 King had chosen the ministry for his profession. 



43 o LYCIDAS 

And shove away the worthy bidden guest ; 

Blind mouths ! that scarce themselves know how to hold 

A sheep-hook, or have learn'd ought else the least I20 

That to the faithful herdman's art belongs! 

What recks 32 it them ? What need they ? They are 

sped ; 
And when they list, their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw, 
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed, I2 s 

But swoln with wind and the rank mist they draw, 
Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; 
Besides what the grim wolf 33 with privy paw 
Daily devours apace, and nothing said: 
But that two-handed engine 33 at the door I3 ° 

Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more." 

Return, Alpheus, the dread voice is past, 
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse, 
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast 
Their bells, and flourets of a thousand hues. I3S 

Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use, 34 
Of shades and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, 
On whose fresh lap the swart star 35 sparely looks, 
Throw hither all your quaint enamel'd eyes, 36 
That on the green turf suck the honied showres, I4 ° 

And purple all the ground with vernal flowres. 
Bring the rathe 37 primrose that forsaken dies, 
The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, 

32 Impersonal. What care they ? 

83 There is a wide divergence of opinion as to what evil things 
St. Peter was pointing to. Luckily, the Muse here returns. 

34 dwell. 

35 The dog star. 
S5 blooms. 

87 early ; " rathe," the positive degree of " rather." 



JOHN MILTON 431 

The white pink, and the pansy freakt with jet, 

The glowing violet, J 45 

The musk-rose, and the well-attir'd woodbine, 

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head, 

And every flower that sad embroidery wears: 

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed, 

And daffodillies fill their cups with tears, z s° 

To strew the laureate hearse 38 where Lycid lies. 

For so to interpose a little ease, 

Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise. 39 

Ay me ! Whilst thee the shores and sounding 40 seas 

Wash far away, where'er thy bones are hurl'd, 1SS 

Whether beyond the stormy Hebrides, 

Where thou perhaps under the whelming tide 

Visit'st the bottom of the monstrous 40a world ; 

Or whether thou, to our moist vows denied, 

Sleep'st by the fable 41 of Bellerus old, l6 ° 

Where the great vision 42 of the guarded mount 

Looks toward Namancos and Bayona's 43 hold; 

Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth, 

And, O ye dolphins, waft the hapless youth. 

Weep no more, woful Shepherds, weep no more, l6s 
For Lycidas your sorrow is not dead, 
Sunk though he be beneath the wat'ry floor ; 
So sinks the day-star 44 in the ocean bed, 

88 Having on it the laurels of a poet. See line 11. 

■ Imagining the coffin of Lycidas present. 

" While all his men 
Gazed at each other with a wild surmise, 
Silent upon a peak of Darien." — Keats. 

40 " pelago sonanti." — Virgil. 40 a peopled with monsters. 

41 fabled land. 

42 apparition. 

■ points seaward. 
44 the sun. 



432 LYCIDAS 

And yet anon repairs his drooping head, 
And tricks his beams, and with new spangled ore 44a T 7° 
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky. 
So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, 
Thro' the dear might of him that walk'd the waves, 
Where other groves, and other streams along, 
With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, J 7S 

And hears the unexpressive 45 nuptial song, 
In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. 
There entertain him all the saints above, 
In solemn troops, and sweet societies, 
That sing, and singing in their glory move, l8 ° 

And wipe the tears for ever from his eyes. 
Now, Lycidas, the shepherds weep no more; 
Henceforth thou art the Genius of the shore, 
In thy large recompense, 46 and shalt be good 
To all that wander in that perilous flood. l8 s 

Thus sang the uncouth 47 swain 48 to th' oaks and rills, 
While the still morn went out with sandals gray; 
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills, 
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay; 
And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills, *9° 

And now was dropt into the western bay ; 
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue, 
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new. 



4 a a precious metal, — " like some ore 

Among a mineral of metals base 

Shows itself pure." — Hamlet, Act IV, Scene I. 
15 beyond the power to express. 
18 great reward. 

17 odd, not cultured. 

18 The " I" of line 3. 




WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR. 
1775-1864. 

Landor lived a long life, began to write early and 
wrote late, both prose and verse. 

A large part of his prose is in the form of Imaginary 
Conversations. These conversations are between scholars 
of all ages. Some of them, as in the Pentameron, where 
Boccaccio and Petrarch are the chief interlocutors, and 
not a few of the separate conversations, " are altogether 
unparalleled in any other language, and not easy to par- 
allel in English." 

" In particular, Landor is remarkable — and, excellent 
as are many of the prose writers whom we have had since, 
he is perhaps the most remarkable — for the weight, the 
beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase." — Saints- 
bury's A History of ipth Century Literature. 

" So many of the most sensitive and discriminating 
critics of this century have, in the suffrage for fame, 
listed themselves for Landor, that it is no longer permis- 
sible for men interested in the things of the mind to neg- 
lect him. He seemed almost to achieve immortality within 
his lifetime, so continuously was the subtle appreciation 
of the best yielded to him, from the far-off years when 
Shelley used at Oxford, to declaim with enthusiasm 
passages from Gebir, to the time, that seems as yesterday, 
when Swinburne made his pilgrimage to Italy, to offer 
his tribute of adoration to the old man at the close of his 
solitary and troubled career; and still each finer spirit, 

435 



436 WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 

" ' As he passes, turns, 
And bids fair peace be to his sable shroud.' " 

— G. E. Woodbury in The Atlantic Monthly. 
Of Landor's poetry, a drama, Count Julian, has many 
admirers. Gebir, the poem which Shelley grew enthusias- 
tic over, is a tale whose aim is a rebuke of the ambition of 
tyrants. It is also a story of the loves of Tamar and the 
Nymph, of Gebir and Choraba. 

It contains faultless passages, as the lines descriptive 
of the sea-shell which Wordsworth seems to have con- 
sciously or unconsciously " adapted." Whether to the 
betterment of the passage is a matter of taste. 

Said the " nymph divine " to Tamar, the brother of 
Gebir : — 

But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue 
Within, and they that luster have imbibed 
In the sun's palace porch, where when unyoked 
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave. 
Shake one and it awakens, then apply 
Its polished lips to your attentive ear, 
And it remembers its august abodes, 
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there. 
Lines of rich full tone are scattered through the 
poem : — 

i. Oh, for the spirit of that matchless man 

Whom Nature led throughout her whole domain. 
Though panting in the play-hour of my youth 
I drank of Avon, too, a dangerous draught, 
That roused within the feverish thirst of song. 

2. Here also those who boasted of their zeal, 
And loved their country for the spoils it gave. 

3. Fears, like the needle verging to the pole, 
Tremble and tremble into certainty. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 437 

4. The silent oars now dip their level wings, 

And weary with strong stroke the whitening wave 

5. Go, from their midnight darkness wake the woods, 
Woo the lone forest in her last retreat. 

Like Charles James Fox, Landor beheld in the French 
Revolution and in Bonaparte's early victories the hope 
of the world. Its later chapters led him, as they did 
Coleridge and Wordsworth, into the other camp. With 
Landor this was a literal leading, as he paid for the 
equipment of one thousand soldiers, and with them" joined 
the Spanish army to resist Napoleon. 



Southey 1 and Porson 8 

Porson. I suspect, Mr. Southey, you are angry with 
me for the freedom with which I have spoken of your 
poetry and Wordsworth's. 

Southey. What could have induced you to imagine 
it, Mr. Professor ? You have indeed bent your eyes upon 
me, since we have been together, with somewhat of fierce- 
ness and defiance : I presume you fancied me to be a com- 
mentator. You wrong me in your belief that any opinion 
on my poetical works hath molested me; but you afford 
me more than compensation in supposing me acutely sen- 
sible of injustice done to Wordsworth. If we must con- 
verse on these topics, we will converse on him. What 
man ever existed who spent a more inoffensive life, or 
adorned it with nobler studies? 

Porson. I believe so; and they who attack him with 
virulence are men of as little morality as reflection. I 
have demonstrated that one of them, he who wrote the 
Pursuits of Literature, could not construe a Greek sen- 
tence or scan a verse ; and I have fallen on the very Index 
from which he drew out his forlorn hope on the parade. 
This is incomparably the most impudent fellow I have met 
with in the course of my reading, which has lain, you 
know, in a province where impudence is no rarity. 

1 The third of what Saintsbury calls " a curiously dissimilar 
trio," Wordsworth and Coleridge being, of course, the first and sec- 
ond. He wrote abundant prose, his Nelson being regarded a model 
piece of biographical work, and abundant poetry. 

2 His name stands for Greek scholarship — " the greatest philolo- 
gist of the age," said Macaulay ; " sulky, abusive, and intolerable," 
said Byron. 

439 



44Q IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

I had visited a friend in King's Road when he entered. 

" Have you seen the Review? " cried he. " Worse 
than ever! I am resolved to insert a paragraph in the 
papers, declaring that I had no concern in the last num- 
ber." 

" Is it so very bad ? " said I, quietly. 

" Infamous ! detestable ! " exclaimed he. 

" Sit down, then : nobody will believe you," was my 
answer. 

Since that morning he has discovered that I drink 
harder 3 than usual, that my faculties are wearing fast 
away, that once, indeed, I had some Greek in my head, 
but — he then claps the forefinger to the side of his nose, 
turns his eye slowly upward, and looks compassionately 
and calmly. 

Southey. Come, Mr. Porson, grant him his merits: 
no critic is better contrived to make any work a monthly 
one, no writer more dexterous in giving a finishing touch. 

Porson. The plagiary^ has a greater latitude of choice 
than we; and if he brings home a parsnip or turnip-top, 
when he could as easily have pocketed a nectarine or a 
pineapple, he must be a blockhead. I never heard the 
name of the Pursuer of Literature, who has little more 
merit in having stolen than he would have had if he had 
never stolen at all ; and I have forgotten that other man's, 
who evinced his fitness to be the censor of our age, by a 
translation of the most naked and impure satires of an- 
tiquity — those of Juvenal, which owe their preservation 
to the partiality of the Friars. I shall entertain an un- 



3 " Porson would drink ink rather than not drink at all." — Home 
Tooke. 

4 One who claims to be the author of something he did not write. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 441 

favorable opinion of him if he has translated them well: 
pray, has he? 

SoutJiey. Indeed, I do not know. I read poets for 
their poetry, and to extract that nutriment of the intellect 
and of the heart which poetry should contain. 5 I never 
listen to the swans of the cesspool, and must declare that 
nothing is heavier to me than rottenness and corruption. 

Porson. You are right, sir, perfectly right. A trans- 
lator of Juvenal would open a public drain to look for a 
needle, and may miss it. My nose is not easily offended ; 
but I must have something to fill my belly. Come, we will 
lay aside the scrip of -the transpositor G and the pouch of 
the pursuer, in reserve for the days of unleavened bread ; 
and again, if you please, to the lakes and mountains. 7 
Now we are both in better humor, I must bring you to a 
confession that in your friend Wordsworth there is occa- 
sionally a little trash. 

Sou they. A haunch of venison would be trash to a 
Brahmin, a bottle of Burgundy to the xerif ° of Mecca. 
We are guided by precept, by habit, by taste, by consti- 
tution. Hitherto our sentiments on poetry have been de- 
livered down to us from authority ; and if it can be 
demonstrated, as I think it may be, that the authority is 
inadequate, and that the dictates are often inapplicable 
and often misinterpreted, you will allow me to remove the 
cause out of court. Every man can see what is very bad 
in a poem ; almost every one can see what is very good : 
but you, Mr. Porson, who have turned over all the vol- 
umes of all the commentators, will inform me whether 



6 Well to do. 

transposer. The Imperial Dictionary quotes this clause. 

7 This is, back to the Lake School's head. 



442 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

I am right or wrong in asserting that no critic hath yet 
appeared who hath been able to fix or to discern the exact 
degrees of excellence above a certain point. 

Porson. None. 

Southey. The reason is, because the eyes of no one 
have been upon a level with it. Supposing, for the sake 
of argument, the contest of Hesiod and Homer to have 
taken place: the judges who decided in favor of the worse, 
and he, indeed, in the poetry has little merit, may have 
been elegant, wise, and conscientious men. Their deci- 
sion was in favor of that to the species of which they had 
been the most accustomed. Corinna 8 was preferred to 
Pindar 8 no fewer than five times, and the best judges in 
Greece gave her the preference; yet whatever were her 
powers, and beyond a question they were extraordinary, 
we may assure ourselves that she stood many degrees 
below Pindar. Nothing is more absurd than the report 
that the judges were prepossessed by her beauty. Plu- 
tarch tells us that she was much older than her competitor, 
who consulted her judgment in his earlier odes. Now, 
granting their first competition to have been when Pindar 
was twenty years old, and that the others were in the 
years succeeding, her beauty must have been somewhat 
on the decline; for in Greece there are few women who 
retain the graces, none who retain the bloom of youth, 
beyond the twenty-third year. Her countenance, I doubt 
not, was expressive: but expression, although it gives 
beauty to men, makes women pay dearly for its stamp, 
and pay soon. Nature seems, in protection to their loveli- 
ness, to have ordered that they who are our superiors in 
quickness and sensibility should be little disposed to la- 

8 Greek lyric poets. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 443 

borious thought, or to long excursions in the labyrinths 
of fancy. We may be convinced that the verdict of the 
judges was biased by nothing else than the habitudes ° 
of thinking; we may be convinced, too, that living in an 
age when poetry was cultivated highly, and selected from 
the most acute and the most dispassionate, they were 
subject to no greater errors of opinion than are the learned 
messmates of our English colleges. 

Porson. You are more liberal in your largesses 9 to 
the fair Greeks than a friend of mine was, who resided in 
Athens to acquire the language. He assured me that 
beauty there was in bud at thirteen, in full blossom at 
fifteen, losing a leaf or two every day at seventeen, trem- 
bling on the thorn at nineteen, and under the tree at 
twenty. 

Southey. Mr. Porson, it does not appear to me that 
anything more is necessary, in the first instance, than to 
interrogate our hearts in what manner they have been 
afifected. If the ear is satisfied ; if at one moment a tumult 
is aroused in the breast, and tranquillized at another, with 
a perfect consciousness of equal power exerted in both 
cases; if we rise up from the perusal of the work with a 
strong excitement to thought, to imagination, to sensibil- 
ity; above all, if we sat down with some propensities 
toward evil, and walk away with much stronger toward 
good, in the midst of a world which we never had entered 
and of which we never had dreamed before — shall we 
perversely put on again the old man of criticism, and dis- 
semble that we have been conducted by a most beneficent 
and most potent genius ? Nothing proves to me so mani- 



judgment as to the fading of their charms. 



444 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

festly in what a pestiferous condition are its lazarettos , 
as when I observe how little hath been objected against 
those who have substituted words for things, and how 
much against those who have reinstated things for words. 
Let Wordsworth prove to the world that there may be 
animation without blood and broken bones, and tender- 
ness remote from the stews. Some will doubt it; for 
even things the most evident are often but little perceived 
and strangely estimated. Swift ridiculed the music of 
Handel and the generalship of Marlborough ; Pope the 
perspicacity and the scholarship of Bentley ; Gray the 
abilities of Shaftesbury and the eloquence of Rousseau. 
Shakespeare hardly found those who would collect his 
tragedies; Milton was read from godliness; Virgil was 
antiquated and rustic ; Cicero, Asiatic. What a rabble has 
persecuted my friend! An elephant is born to be con- 
sumed by ants in the midst of his unapproachable soli- 
tudes : Wordsworth is the prey of Jeffrey. Why re- 
pine? Let us rather amuse ourselves with allegories, 
and recollect that God in the creation left his noblest 
creature at the mercy of a serpent. 

Porson. Wordsworth goes out of his way to be at- 
tacked ; he picks up a piece of dirt, throws it on the carpet 
in the midst of the company, and cries, This is a better 
man than any of you! He does indeed mold the base 
material into what form he chooses; but why not rather 
invite us to contemplate it than challenge us to> condemn 
it? Here surely is false taste. 

Southey. The principal and the most general accusa- 
tion against him is, that the vehicle of his thoughts is un- 
equal to them. Now did ever the judges at the Olympic 
games say, " We would have awarded to you the meed 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 445 

of victory, if your chariot had been equal to your horses : 
it is true they have won ; but the people are displeased at 
a car neither new nor richly gilt, and without a gryphon ° 
or sphinx engraved on the axle ? " You admire simplic- 
ity in Euripides; you censure it in Wordsworth: believe 
me, sir, it arises in neither from penury of thought — 
which seldom has produced it — but from the strength of 
temperance, and at the suggestion of principle. 

Take up a* poem of Wordsworth's and read it — I 
would rather say, read them all; and, knowing that a 
mind like yours must grasp closely what comes within it, 
I will then appeal to you whether any poet of our country, 
since Milton, hath exerted greater powers with less of 
strain and less of ostentation. I would, however, by his 
permission, lay before you for this purpose a poem which 
is yet unpublished and incomplete. 

Porson. Pity, with such abilities, he does not imitate 
the ancients somewhat more. 

Southey. Whom did they imitate? If his genius is 
equal to theirs he has no need of a guide. He also will be 
an ancient ; and the very counterparts of those who now 
decry him will extol him a thousand years hence in malig- 
nity to the moderns. 



John of Gaunt' and Joanna 
of Kent 2 



Joanna. How is this, my cousin, that you are be- 
sieged 3 in your own house, by the citizens of London ? I 
thought you were their idol. 

Gaunt. If their idol, madam, I am one which they 
may tread on as they list when down ; but which, by my 
soul and knighthood ! the ten best battle-axes among them 
shall find it hard work to unshrine. 

Pardon me: I. have no right perhaps to take or touch 
this hand; yet, my sister, bricks and stones and arrows 
are not presents fit for you. Let me conduct you some 
paces hence. 

Joanna. I will speak to those below in the street. 
Quit my hand : they shall obey me. 

Gaunt. If you intend to order my death, madam, your 
guards who have entered my court, and whose spurs and 
halberts I hear upon the staircase, may overpower my 
domestics; and, seeing no such escape as becomes my 
dignity, I submit to you. Behold my sword and gauntlet 
at your feet! Some formalities, I trust, will be used in 
the proceedings against me. Entitle me, in my attainder, 

1 " Time-honored Lancaster," uncle of Richard II., and father of 
Henry IV., but with a higher title, the protector of Chaucer. 

2 Wife of the Black Prince and mother of Richard II. 

3 " In the face of the popular hatred toward John of Gaunt, 
Langland (in The Complaint of Piers the Ploughman), paints the 
Duke in a famous apologue as the cat who, greedy as she might be, 
at any rate keeps the noble rats from utterly devouring the mice 
of the people." — Green's A Shorter History of England. 

446 



Walter savags lamdor 447 

not John of Gaunt, not Duke of Lancaster, not King of 
Castile; nor commemorate my father, the most glorious 
of princes, the vanquisher and pardoner of the most 
powerful; nor style me, what those who loved or who 
flattered me did when I was happier, cousin to the Fair 
Maid of Kent. Joanna, those days are over! But no 
enemy, no law, no eternity can take away from me or 
move further off, my affinity in bloo'd to the conqueror 4 
in the field of Crecy, of Poitiers, and Najora. Edward 
was my brother when he was but your cousin ; and the 
edge of my shield has clinked on his in many a battle. 
Yes, we were ever near — if not in worth, in danger. She 
weeps. 

Joanna. Attainder ! God avert it ! Duke of Lancas- 
ter, what dark thought — alas ! that the Regency 5 should 
have known it! I came hither, sir, for no such purpose 
as to ensnare or incriminate or alarm you. 

These weeds might surely have protected me from the 
fresh tears you have drawn forth. 

Gaunt. Sister, be comforted! this visor, too, has felt 
them. 

Joanna. O my Edward ! my own so lately ! Thy 
memory — thy beloved image — which never hath aban- 
doned me, makes me bold : I dare not say " generous ; " 
for in saying it I should cease to be so — and who could 
be called generous by the side of thee ? I will rescue from 
perdition the enemy of my son. 

Cousin, you loved your brother. Love, then, what was 
dearer to him than his life: protect what he, valiant as 
you have seen him, cannot! The father, who foiled so 

4 Edward, the Black Prince. 
8 Duke of Gloucester, probably. 



448 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

many, hath left no enemies ; the innocent child, who can 
injure no one, finds them! 

Why have you unlaced and laid aside your visor? Do 
not expose your body to those missiles. Hold your shield 
before yourself, and step aside. I need it not. I am 
resolved — • 

Gaunt. On what, my cousin? Speak, and, by the 
saints ! it shall be done. This breast is your shield ; this 
arm is mine. 

Joanna. Heavens! who could have hurled those 
masses of stone from below? they stunned me. Did they 
descend all of them together; or did they split into frag- 
ments on hitting the pavement? 

Gaunt. Truly, I was not looking that way : they came, 
I must believe, while you were speaking. 

Joanna. Aside, aside ! further back ! disregard me ! 
Look ! that last arrow sticks half its head deep in the 
wainscoat. .It shook so violently I did not see the feather 
at first. 

No, no, Lancaster ! I will not permit it. Take your 
shield up again ; and keep it all before you. Now step 
aside : I am resolved to prove whether the people will 
hear me. 

Gaunt. Then, madam, by your leave 

Joanna. Hold ! 

Gaunt. Villains ! take back to your kitchens those 
spits and skewers that you, forsooth, would fain call 
swords and arrows ; and keep your bricks and stones for 
your graves ! 

Joanna. Imprudent man ! who can save you ? I shall 
be frightened : I must speak at once. 

O good kind people ! ye who so greatly loved me, when 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 449 

I am sure I had done nothing to deserve it, have I (un- 
happy me !) no merit with you now, when I would assuage 
your anger, protect your fame, and send you home 
contented with yourselves and me? Who is he, worthy 
citizens, whom ye would drag to slaughter? 

True, indeed, he did revile some one. Neither I nor 
you can say whom — some feaster and rioter, it seems, 
who had little right (he thought) to carry sword or bow, 
and who, to show it, hath slunk away. And then another 
raised his anger : he was indignant that, under his roof, 
a woman should be exposed to stoning. Which of you 
would not be as choleric in a like affront? In the house 
of which among you should I not be protected as reso- 
lutely? 

No, no: I never can believe those angry cries. Let 
none ever tell me again he is the enemy of my son, of his 
king, your darling child, Richard. Are your fears more 
lively than a poor weak female's ? than a mother's ? yours, 
whom he hath so often led to victory, and praised to his 
father, naming each — he, John of Gaunt, the defender 
of the helpless, the comforter of the desolate, the rallying 
signal of the desperately brave! 

Retire, Duke of Lancaster ! This is no time 

Gaunt. Madam, I obey; but not through terror of 
that puddle at the house-door, which my handful of 
dust would dry up. Deign to command me! 

Joanna. In the name of my son, then, retire ! 

Gaunt. Angelic goodness! I must fairly win it. 

Joanna. I think I know his voice that crieth out, 
" Who will answer for him ? " An honest and loyal 
man's, one who would counsel and save me in my diffi- 
culty and danger. With what pleasure and satisfaction, 
29 



45 o IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

with what perfect joy and confidence, do I answer our 
right-trusty and well- judging friend! 

" Let Lancaster bring his sureties," say you, " and we 
separate." A moment yet before we separate; if I might 
delay you so long, to receive your sanction of those se- 
curities: for, in such grave matters, it would ill become 
us to be over-hasty. I could bring fifty, I could bring a 
hundred, not from among soldiers, not from among court- 
iers; but selected from yourselves, were it equitable and 
fair to show such partialities, or decorous in the parent 
and guardian of a king to offer any other than herself. 

Raised by the hand of the Almighty from amidst you, 
but still one of you, if the mother of a family is a part of 
it, here I stand surety for John of Gaunt, Duke of Lan- 
caster, for his loyalty and allegiance. 

Gaunt {running back toward Joanna). Are the 
rioters, then, bursting into the chamber through the 
windows ? 

Joanna. The windows and doors of this solid edifice 
rattled and shook at the people's acclamation. My word is 
given for you : this was theirs in return. Lancaster ! what 
a voice have the people when they speak out ! It shakes 
me with astonishment, almost with consternation, while it 
establishes the throne: what must it be when it is lifted 
up in vengeance! 

Gaunt. Wind ; vapor 

Joanna. Which none can wield nor hold. Need I 
say this to my cousin of Lancaster? 

Gaunt. Rather say, madam, that there is always one 
star above which can tranquillize and control them. 

Joanna. Go, cousin ! another time more sincerity ! 

Gaunt. You have this day saved my life from the 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 451 

people; for I now see my danger better, when it is no 
longer close before me. My Christ ! if ever I forget 

Joanna. Swear not : every man in England hath 
sworn what you would swear. But if you abandon my 
Richard, my brave and beautiful child, may — Oh! I 
could never curse, nor wish an evil ; but, if you desert 
him in the hour of need, you will think of those who 
have not deserted you, and your own great heart will 
lie heavy on you, Lancaster! 

Am I graver than I ought to be, that you look de- 
jected? Come, then, gentle cousin, lead me to my horse, 
and accompany me home. Richard will embrace us ten- 
derly. Every one is dear to every other upon rising out 
fresh from peril ; affectionately then will he look, sweet 
boy, upon his mother and his uncle ! Never mind how 
many questions he may ask you, nor how strange ones. 
His only displeasure, if he has any, will be that he stood 
not against the rioters or among them. 

Gaunt. Older than he' have been as fond of mischief., 
and as fickle in the choice of a party. 

I shall tell him that, coming to blows, the assailant is 
often in the right; that the assailed is always. 



Leofric and Godiva 



Go diva. There is a dearth in the land, my sweet 
Leofric ! Remember how many weeks of drought we 
have had, even in the deep pastures of Leicestershire; 
and how many Sundays we have heard the same prayers 
for rain, and supplications that it would please the Lord 
in his mercy to turn aside his anger froYn the poor, pining 
cattle. You, my dear husband, have imprisoned more 
than one malefactor for leaving his dead ox in the public 
way; and other hinds have fled before you out of the 
traces, in which they, and their sons and their daughters, 
and haply their old fathers and mothers, were dragging 
the abandoned wain homeward. Although we were ac- 
companied by many brave spearmen and skillful archers, 
it was perilous to pass the creatures which the farm-yard 
dogs, driven from the hearth by the poverty of their mas- 
ters, were tearing and devouring ; while others, bitten and 
lamed, filled the air either with long and deep howls or 
sharp and quick barkings, as they struggled with hunger 
and feebleness, or were exasperated by heat and pain. 
Nor could the thyme from the heath, nor the bruised 
branches of the fir-tree, extinguish or abate the foul odor. 

Leofric. And now, Godiva, my darling, thou art 
afraid we should be eaten up before we enter the gates of 
Coventry; or perchance that in the gardens there are no 
roses to greet thee, no sweet herbs for thy mat and pillow. 

Godiva. Leofric, I have no such fears. This is the 

month of roses : I find them everywhere since my blessed 

marriage. They, and all other sweet herbs, I know not 

why, seem to greet me wherever I look at them, as though 

453 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 453 

they knew and expected me. Surely they cannot feel 
that I am fond of them. 

Leofric. O light, laughing simpleton ! But what 
wouldst thou? I came not hither to pray; and yet if 
praying would satisfy thee, or remove the drought, I 
would ride up straightway to Saint Michael's and pray 
until morning. 

Godiva. I would do the same, O Leofric! but God 
hath turned away his ear from holier lips than mine. 
Would my own dear husband hear me, if I implored him 
for what is easier to accomplish, — what he can do like 
God? 

Leofric. How ! what is it ? 

Godiva. I would not, in the first hurry of your wrath, 
appeal to you, my loving Lord, in behalf of these unhappy 
men who have offended you. 

Leofric. Unhappy ! is that all ? 

Godiva. Unhappy they must surely be, to have of- 
fended you so grievously. What a soft air breathes over 
us ! how quiet and serene and still an evening ! how calm 
are the heavens and the earth-! — Shall none enjoy them; 
not even we, my Leofric? The sun is ready to set: let 
it never set, 1 O Leofric, on your anger. These are not 
my words: they are better than mine. Should they lose 
their virtue from my unworthiness in uttering them? 

Leofric. Godiva, wouldst thou plead to me for rebels ? 

Godiva. They have, then, drawn the sword against 
you? Indeed, I knew it not. 

Leofric. They have omitted to send me my dues, 
established by my ancestors, well knowing of our nuptials, 



1 " Let not the sun go down upon your wrath." 



454 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

and of the charges and festivities they require, and that in 

a season of such scarcity my own lands are insufficient. 

Godiva. If they were starving, as they said they 



were 



Leofric. Must I starve too ? Is it not enough to lose 
my vassals ? 

Godiva. Enough! O God! too much! too much! 
May you never lose them! Give them life, peace, com- 
fort, contentment. There are those among them who 
kissed me in my infancy, and who blessed me at the bap- 
tismal font. Leofric, Leofric ! the first old man I meet 
I shall think is one of those ; and I shall think on the bless- 
ing he gave, and (ah me!) on the blessing I bring back 
to him. My heart will bleed, will burst ; and he will weep 
at it ! he will weep, poor soul, for the wife of a cruel lord 
who denounces vengeance on him, who carries death into 
his family! 

Leofric. We must hold solemn festivals. 

Godiva. We must, indeed. 

Leofric. Well, then? 

Godiva. Is the clamorousness that succeeds the death 
of God's dumb creatures, are crowded halls, are slaught- 
ered cattle, festivals ? — are maddening songs, and giddy 
dances, and hireling praises from parti-colored coats? 
Can the voice of a minstrel tell us better things of our- 
selves than our own internal one might tell us ; or can his 
breath make our breath softer in sleep ? O my beloved ! 
let everything be a joyance to us : it will, if we will. Sad 
is the day, and worse must follow, when we hear the black- 
bird in the garden, and do not throb with joy. But, 
Leofric, the high festival is strown by the servant of God 
upon the heart of man. It is gladness, it is thanksgiving ; 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 455 

it is the orphan, the starveling, pressed to the bosom, and 
bidden as its first commandment to remember its bene- 
factor. We will hold this festival ; the guests are ready : 
we may keep it up for weeks, and months, and years 
together, and always be the happier and the richer for 
it. The beverage of this feast, O Leofric, is sweeter than 
bee or flower or vine can give us : it flows from heaven ; 
and in heaven will it abundantly be poured out again to 
him who pours it out here abundantly. 

Leofric. Thou art wild. 

Godiva. I have, indeed, lost myself. Some Power, 
some good kind Power, melts me (body and soul and 
voice) into tenderness and love. O my husband, we must 
obey it. Look upon me ! look upon me ! lift your sweet 
eyes from the ground ! I will not cease to supplicate ; I 
dare not. 

Leofric. We may think upon it. 

Godiva. O never say that ! What ! think upon good- 
ness when you can be good ? Let not the infants cry for 
sustenance ! The mother of our blessed Lord will hear 
them ; us never, never afterward. 

Leofric. Here comes the Bishop : we are but one mile 
from the walls. Why dismountest thou? no bishop can 
expect it. Godiva ! my honor and rank among men are 
humbled by this. Earl Godwin will hear of it. Up ! up ! 
the Bishop hath seen it : he urgeth his horse onward. 
Dost thou not hear him now upon the solid turf behind 
thee? 

Godiva. Never, no, never will I rise, O Leofric, until 
you remit this impious task — this tax on hard labor, 
on hard life. 

Leofric. Turn round : look how the fat nag canters, 



456 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

as to the tune of a sinner's psalm, slow and hard-breath- 
ing. What reason or right can the people have to com- 
plain while their bishop's steed is so sleek and well 
caparisoned ? Inclination to change, desire to abolish old 
usages. — Up ! up ! for shame ! They shall smart for it, 
idlers! Sir Bishop, I must blush for my young bride. 

Godiva. My husband, my husband! will you pardon 
the city? 

Leofric. Sir Bishop! I could not think you would 
have seen her in this plight. Will I pardon ? Yea, Godiva, 
by the holy rood, will I pardon the city, when thou ridest 
naked at noontide through the streets ! 

Godiva. O my dear, cruel Leofric, where is the heart 
you gave me ? It was not so : can mine have hardened it ? 

Bishop. Earl, thou abashest thy spouse; she turneth 
pale, and weepeth. Lady Godiva, peace be with thee. 

Godiva. Thanks, holy man! peace will be with me 
when peace is with your city. Did you hear my Lord's 
cruel word? 

Bishop. I did, lady. 

Godiva. Will you remember it, and pray against it? 

Bishop. Wilt thou forget it, daughter? 

Godiva. I am not offended. 

Bishop. 'Angel of peace and purity ! 

Godiva. But treasure it up in your heart : deem it an 
incense, good only when it is consumed and spent, ascend- 
ing with prayer and sacrifice. And, now, what was it? 

Bishop. Christ save us ; that he will pardon the city 
when thou ridest naked through the streets at noon. 

Godiva. Did he swear an oath? 

Bishop. He sware by the holy rood. 

Godiva. My Redeemer, thou hast heard it! save the 
city! 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 457 

Leofric. We are now upon the beginning of the pave- 
ment: these are the suburbs. Let us think of feasting: 
we may pray afterward ; to-morrow we shall rest. 

Godiva. No judgments, !hen, to-morrow, Leofric? 

Leofric. None : we will carouse. 

Godiva, The saints of heaven have given me strength 
and confidence ; my prayers are heard ; the heart of my 
beloved is now softened. 

Leofric. Ay, ay. 

Godiva. Say, dearest Leofric, is there indeed no 
other hope, no other mediation? 

Leofric. I have sworn. Beside, thou hast made me 
redden and turn my face away from thee, and all the 
knaves have seen it; this adds to the city's crime. 

Godiva. I have blushed too, Leofric, and was not 
rash nor obdurate. 

Leofric. But thou, my sweetest, art given to blush- 
ing : there is no conquering it in thee. I wish thou hadst 
not alighted so hastily and roughly : it hath shaken down 
a sheaf of thy hair. Take heed thou sit not upon it, lest it 
anguish thee. Well done! it mingleth now sweetly with 
the cloth of gold upon the saddle, running here and there, 
as if it had life and faculties and business, and were work- 
ing thereupon some newer and cunninger device. O my 
beauteous Eve ! there is a Paradise about thee ! the world 
is refreshed as thou movest and breathest on it. I cannot 
see or think of evil where thou art. I could throw my 
arms even here about thee. No signs for me ! no shaking 
of sunbeams ! no reproof or frown of wonderment. — I 
ztnll say it — now, then, for worse — I could close with 
my kisses thy half-open lips, ay, and those lovely and 
loving eyes, before the people. 



458 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Godiva. To-morrow you shall kiss me, and they shall 
bless you for it. I shall be very pale, for to-night I must 
fast and pray. 

Leofric. I do not hear thee ; the voices of the folks 
are so loud under this archway. 

Godiva (to herself). God help them! good kind 
souls ! I hope they will not crowd about me so to-morrow. 
O Leofric! could my name be forgotten, and yours alone 
remembered! But perhaps my innocence may save me 
from reproach ; and how many as innocent are in fear and 
famine! No eye will open on me but fresh from tears. 
What a young mother for so large a family ! Shall my 
youth harm me ? Under God's hand it gives me courage. 
Ah! when will the morning come? Ah! when will the 
noon be over ? 



Diogenes 1 and Plato 2 



Diogenes. Stop ! stop ! come hither ! Why lookest 
thou so scornfully and askance upon me ? 

Plato. Let me go ! loose me ! I am resolved to pass. 

Diogenes. Nay, then, by Jupiter and this tub ! thou 
leavest three good ells of Milesian cloth behind thee. 
Whither wouldst thou amble? 

Plato. I am not obliged in courtesy to tell you. 

Diogenes. Upon whose errand ? Answer me directly. 

Plato. Upon my own. 

Diogenes. Oh, then I will hold thee yet awhile. If 
it were upon another's, it might be a hardship to a good 
citizen, though not to a good philosopher. 

Plato. That can be no impediment to my release : you 
do not think me one. 

Diogenes. No, by my Father Jove! 

Plato. Your father ! 

Diogenes. Why not? Thou shouldst be the last man 
to doubt it. Hast not thou declared it irrational to refuse 
our belief to those who assert that they are begotten by 
the gods, though the assertion (these are thy words) be 



1 The Greek who lived, sometimes, in a tub ; refused to be in- 
itiated into the mysteries of Ceres, hence was " worse than an 
infidel ; " visited by Alexander the Great, in reply to whether he 
wanted anything, replied, " Yes, that you would stand out of my 
sunshine." 

2 One of the most eminent of Greek philosophers and writers, 
much read in this age in the original and more in translation. Cicero 
said that he could never read Plato's description of the death of 
Socrates without tears — " illacrymari soleo Platonem legens." Plato 
believed in the immortality of the soul. " Yes, it must be so. Plato, 
thou reasonest well." — Addison's Cato. 

459 



460 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

unfounded on reason or probability? In me there is a 
chance of it : whereas in the generation of such people as 
thou art fondest of frequenting, who claim it loudly, there 
are always too many competitors to leave it probable. 

Plato. Those who speak against the great do not 
usually speak from morality, but from envy. 

Diogenes. Thou hast a glimpse of the truth in this 
place, but as thou hast already shown thy ignorance in 
attempting to prove to me what a man is, ill can I expect 
to learn from thee what is a great man. 

Plato. No doubt your experience and intercourse will 
afford me the information. 

Diogenes. Attend, and take it. The great man is he 
who hath nothing to fear and nothing to hope from an- 
other. It is he who, while he demonstrates the iniquity of 
the laws, and is able to correct them, obeys them peaceably. 
It is he who looks on the ambitious both as weak and 
fraudulent. It is he who hath no disposition or occasion 
for any kind of deceit, no reason for being or for appear- 
ing different from what he is. It is he who can call 
together the most select company when it pleases him. 

Plato. Excuse my interruption. In the beginning of 
your definition I fancied that you were designating your 
own person, as most people do in describing what is ad- 
mirable; now I find that you have some other in contem- 
plation. 

Diogenes. I thank thee for allowing me what perhaps 
I do possess, but what I was not then thinking of; as is 
often the case with rich possessors : in fact, the latter part 
of the description suits me as well as any portion of the 
former. 

Plato. You may call together the best company, by 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 461 

using your hands in the call, as you did with me ; other- 
wise I am not sure that you would succeed in it. 

Diogenes. My thoughts are my company ; I can bring 
them together, select them, detain them, dismiss them. 
Imbecile and vicious men cannot do any of these things. 
Their thoughts are scattered, vague, uncertain, cumber- 
some : and the worst stick to them the longest ; many in- 
deed by choice, the greater part by necessity, and accom- 
panied, some by weak wishes, others by vain remorse. 

Plato. Is there nothing of greatness, O Diogenes ! in 
exhibiting how cities and communities may be governed 
best, how morals may be kept the purest, and power be- 
come the most stable? 

Diogenes. Something of greatness does not constitute 
the great man. Let me however see him who hath done 
what thou sayest : he must be the most universal and the 
most indefatigable traveler, he must also be the oldest 
creature, upon earth. 

Plato. How so? 

Diogenes. Because he must know perfectly the cli- 
mate, the soil, the situation, the peculiarities, of the races, 
of their allies, of their enemies ; he must have sounded 
their harbors, he must have measured the quantity of their 
arable land and pasture, of their woods and mountains; 
he must have ascertained whether there are fisheries on 
their coast, and even what winds are prevalent. On these 
causes, with some others, depend the bodily strength, the 
numbers, the wealth, the wants, the capacities of the 
people. 

Plato. Such are low thoughts. 

Diogenes. The bird of wisdom flies low, and seeks her 
food under hedges : the eagle himself would be starved if 



462 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

he always soared aloft and against the sun. The sweetest 
fruit grows near the ground, and the plants that bear it 
require ventilation and lopping. Were this not to be done 
in thy garden, every walk and alley, every plot and border, 
would be covered with runners and roots, with boughs and 
suckers. We want no poets or logicians or metaphysicians 
to govern us : we want practical men, honest men, con- 
tinent men, unambitious men, fearful to solicit a trust, slow 
to accept, and resolute never to betray one. Experiment- 
alists may be the best philosophers : they are always the 
worst politicians. Teach people their duties, and they 
will know their interests. Change as little as possible, and 
correct as much. 

Philosophers are absurd from many causes, but prin- 
cipally from laying out unthriftily their distinctions. They 
set up four virtues : fortitude, prudence, temperance, and 
justice. Now a man may be a very bad one, and yet pos- 
sess three out of the four. Every cut-throat must, if he 
has been a cut-throat on many occasions, have more forti- 
tude and more prudence than the greater part of those 
whom we consider as the best men. And what cruel 
wretches, both executioners and judges, have been strictly 
just! how little have they cared what gentleness, what 
generosity, what genius, their sentence hath removed from 
the earth ! Temperance and beneficence contain all other 
virtues. Take them home, Plato; split them, expound 
them ; do what thou wilt with them, if thou but use them. 

Before I gave thee this lesson, which is a better than 
thou ever gavest any one, and easier to remember, thou 
wert accusing me of invidiousness and malice against 
those whom thou callest the great, meaning to say the 
powerful, Thy imagination, I am well aware, had taken 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 463 

its flight toward Sicily, where thou seekest thy great man, 
as earnestly and undoubtingly as Ceres sought her Per- 
sephone, 3 Faith ! honest Plato, I have no reason to envy 
thy worthy friend Dionysius. 4 Look at my nose. A lad 
seven or eight years old threw an apple at me yesterday, 
while I was gazing at the clouds, and gave me nose enough 
for two moderate men. Instead of such a godsend, what 
should I have thought of my fortune if, after living all 
my lifetime among golden vases, rougher than my hand 
with their emeralds and rubies, their engravings and em- 
bossments ; among Parian caryatides and porphyry 
sphinxes ; among philosophers with rings upon their fin- 
gers and linen next their skin ; and among singing-boys 
and dancing-girls, to whom alone thou speakest intelli- 
gibly — I ask thee again, what should I in reason have 
thought of my fortune, if, after these facilities and super- 
fluities, I had at last been pelted out of my house, not by 
one young rogue, but by thousands of all ages, and not 
with an apple (I wish I could say a rotton one), but with 
pebbles and broken pots ; and, to crown my deserts, had 
been compelled to become the teacher of so promising a 
generation ? Great men, forsooth ! thou knowest at last 
who they are. 

Plato. There are great men of various kinds. 

Diogenes. No, by my beard, are there not ! 

Plato. What ! are there not great captains, great geo- 
metricians, great dialectitians ? 



3 Persephone, or Proserpine, gathering flowers in Sicily, was 
carried off by Pluto to his gloomy kingdom below, whither her 
mother Ceres undauntedly followed. 

4 Dionysius the Younger, Tyrant of Syracuse, invited Plato to 
his court, where he sojourned for a time. The story in old Rollin is 
surpassingly interesting. 



464 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Diogenes. Who denied it? A great man was the 
postulate. Try thy hand now at the powerful one. 

Plato. On seeing the exercise of power, a child can- 
not doubt who is powerful, more or less; for power is 
relative. All men are weak, not only if compared to the 
Demiurgos, but if compared to the sea or the earth, or 
certain things upon each of them, such as elephants and 
whales. So placid and tranquil is the scene around us, we 
can hardly bring to mind the images of strength and force, 
the precipices, the abysses 

Diogenes. Prythee hold thy loose tongue, twinkling 
and glittering like a serpent's in the midst of luxuriance 
and rankness ! Did never this reflection of thine warn 
thee that, in human life, the precipices and abysses would 
be much farther from our admiration if we were less in- 
considerate, selfish, and vile ? I will not however, stop thee 
long, for thou wert going on quite consistently. As thy 
great men are fighters and wranglers, so thy mighty things 
upon the earth and sea are troublesome and intractable 
encumbrances. Thou preceivedst not what was greater 
in the former case, neither art thou aware what is greater 
in this. Didst thou feel the gentle air that passed us ? 

Plato. I did not, just then. 

Diogenes. That air, so gentle, so imperceptible to 
thee, is more powerful not only than all the creatures that 
breathe and live by it; not only than all the oaks of the 
forest, which it rears in an age and shatters in a moment ; 
not only than all the monsters of the sea, but than the sea 
itself, which it tosses up into foam, and breaks against 
every rock in its vast circumference ; for it carries in its 
bosom, with perfect calm and composure, the incontrol- 
lable ocean and the peopled earth, like an atom of a 
feather. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 465 

To the world's turmoils and pageantries is attacted, not 
only the admiration of the populace, but the zeal of the 
orator, the enthusiasm of the poet, the investigation of the 
historian, and the contemplation of the philosopher : yet 
how silent and invisible are they in the depths of air ! Do 
I say in those depths and deserts ? No ; I say in the 
distance of a swallow's flight, — at the distance she rises 
above us, ere a sentence brief as this could be uttered. 

What are its mines and mountains? Fragments 
welded up and dislocated by the expansion of water from 
below ; the most part reduced to mud, the rest to splinters. 
Afterward sprang up fire in many places, and again tore 
and mangled the mutilated carcass, and still growls over it. 

What are its cities and ramparts, and moles and monu- 
ments? Segments of a fragment, which one man puts 
together and another throws down. Here we stumble 
upon thy great ones at their work. Show me now, if 
thou canst, in history, three great warriors, or three 
great statesmen, who have acted otherwise than spite- 
ful children. 

Plato. I will begin to look for them in history when 
I have discovered the same number in the philosophers 
or the poets. A prudent man searches in his own garden 
after the plant he wants, before he casts his eyes over the 
stalls in Kenkrea or Keramicos. 

Returning to your observation on the potency of the 
air, I am not ignorant or unmindful of it. May I ven- 
ture to express my opinion to you, Diogenes, that the 
earlier discoverers and distributors of wisdom (which wis- 
dom lies among us in ruins and remnants, partly distorted 
and partly concealed by theological allegory) meant by 
Jupiter the air in its agitated state; by Juno the air in 
3° 



466 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

its quiescent. These are the great agents, and therefore 
called the king and queen of the gods. Jupiter is denom- 
inated by Homer the compeller of clouds: Juno receives 
them, and remits them in showers to plants and animals. 

I may trust you, I hope, O Diogenes ? 5 

Diogenes. Thou mayest lower the gods in my pres- 
ence, as safely as men in the presence of Timon. 6 

Plato. I would not lower them : I would exalt them. 

Diogenes. More foolish and presumptuous still ! 

Plato. Fair words, O Sinopean ! 7 I protest to you my 
aim is truth. 

Diogenes. I cannot lead thee where of a certainty thou 
mayest always find it; but I will tell thee what it is. 
Truth is a point; the subtilest and finest; harder than 
adamant ; never to be broken, worn away, or blunted. Its 
only bad quality is, that it is sure to hurt those who touch 
it; and likely to draw blood, perhaps the life-blood, of 
those who press earnestly upon it. Let us away from this 
narrow lane skirted with hemlock, and pursue our road 
again through the wind and dust, toward the great man 
and the powerful. Him I would call the powerful one 
who controls the storms of his mind, and turns to good 
account the worst accidents of his fortune. The great 
man, I was going on to demonstrate, is somewhat more. 
He must be able to do this, and he must have an intellect 8 
which puts into motion the intellect of others. 

Plato. Socrates, then, was your great man. 

Diogenes. He was indeed; nor can all thou hast at- 
tributed to him ever make me think the contrary. I wish 

6 You will not make known my lack of orthodoxy? 

6 Read Shakespeare's Timon of Athens. 

7 Native of Sinope, a city of Pontus. 

8 A teacher well defined. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 467 

he could have kept a little more at home, and have thought 
it as worth his while to converse with his own children 
as with others. 

Plato. He knew himself born for the benefit of the 
human race. 

Diogenes. Those who are born for the benefit of the 
human race go but little into it : those who are born for 
its curse are crowded. 

Plato. It was requisite to dispel the mists of igno- 
rance and error. 

Diogenes. Has he done it? What doubt has he eluci- 
dated, or what fact has he established ? Although I was 
but twelve years old and resident in another city when he 
died, I have taken some pains in my inquiries about him 
from persons of less vanity and less perverseness than his 
disciples. He did not leave behind him any true phi- 
losopher among them; any who followed his mode of 
argumentation, his subjects of disquisition, or his course 
of life ; any who would subdue the malignant passions 
or coerce the looser ; any who would abstain from calumny 
or from cavil ; any who would devote his days to the glory 
of his country, or, what is easier and perhaps wiser, 
to his own well-founded contentment and well-merited 
repose. Xenophon, 9 the best of them, offered up sac- 
rifices, believed in oracles, consulted soothsayers, turned 
pale at a jay, and was dysenteric at a magpie. 

Plato. He had courage at least. 

Diogenes. His courage was of so strange a quality, 
that he was ready, if jay or magpie did not cross him, to 
fight for Spartan or Persian. Plato, whom thou esteemest 
much more, and knowest somewhat less, careth as little 

He who commanded, and wrote, The Anabasis, 



468 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

for portent and omen as doth Diogenes. What he would 
have done for a Persian I cannot say; certain I am that 
he would have no more fought for a Spartan than he 
would for his own father : yet he mortally hates the man 
who hath a kinder muse or a better milliner, or a seat 
nearer the minion of a king. So much for the two 
disciples of Socrates who have acquired the greatest 

celebrity ! 

* * * 

Plato. Diogenes ! if you must argue or discourse with 
me, I will endure your asperity for the sake of your acute- 
ness ; but it appears to me a more philosophical thing to 
avoid what is insulting and vexatious, than to breast and 
brave it. 

Diogenes. Thou hast spoken well. 

Plato. It belongs to the vulgar, not to us, to fly from 
a man's opinions to his actions, and to stab him in his own 
house for having received no wound in the school. One 
merit you will allow me : I always keep my temper ; which 
you seldom do. 

Diogenes. Is mine a good or a bad one? 

Plato. Now, must I speak sincerely? 

Diogenes. Dost thou, a philosopher, ask such a ques- 
tion of me, a philosopher. Ay, sincerely or not at all. 

Plato. Sincerely as you could wish, I must declare, 
then, your temper is the worst in the world. 

Diogenes. I am much in the right, therefore, not to 
keep it. Embrace me : I have spoken now in thy own 
manner. Because thou sayest the most malicious things 
the most placidly, thou thinkest or pretendest thou art 
sincere. 

Plato. Certainly those who are most the masters 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 469 

of their resentments are likely to speak less erroneously 
than the passionate and morose. 

Diogenes. If they would, they might; but the moder- 
ate are not usually the most sincere, for the same circum- 
spection which makes them moderate makes them likewise 
retentive of what could give offense: they are also timid 
in regard to fortune and favor, and hazard little. There 
is no mass of sincerity in any place. What there is must 
be picked up patiently, a grain or two at a time ; and the 
season for it is after a storm, after the overflowing of 
banks, and bursting of mounds, and sweeping away of 
landmarks. Men will always hold something back ; they 
must be shaken and loosened a little, to make them let go 
what is deepest in them, and weightiest and purest. 

Plato. Shaking and loosening as much about you as 
was requisite for the occasion, it became you to demon- 
strate where and in what manner I had made Socrates 
appear less sagacious and less eloquent than he was ; it 
became you likewise to consider the great difficulty of 
finding new thoughts and new expressions for those who 
had more of them than any other men, and to represent 
them in all the brilliancy of their wit and in all the majesty 
of their genius. I do not assert that I have done it ; but 
if I have not, what man has? what man has come so nigh 
to it? He who could bring Socrates, or Solon, 10 or Diog- 
enes through a dialogue, without disparagement, is much 
nearer in his intellectual powers to them, than any other 
is near to him. 

Diogenes. Let Diogenes alone, and Socrates, and 
Solon. None of the three ever occupied his hours in tinge- 



The great lawgiver. 



47o IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

ing and curling the tarnished plumes of prostitute Phi- 
losophy, or deemed anything worth his attention, care, or 
notice, that did not make men brave and independent. As 
thou callest on me to show thee where and in what manner 
thou hast misrepresented thy teacher, and as thou seemest 
to set an equal value on eloquence and on reasoning, I shall 
attend to thee awhile on each of these matters, first inquir- 
ing of thee whether the axiom is Socratic, that it is 
never becoming to get drunk, unless in the solemnities of 
Bacchus. 11 

Plato. This god was the discoverer of the vine and 
of its uses. 

Diogenes. Is drunkenness one of its uses, or the dis- 
covery of a god? If Pallas 12 or Jupiter hath given us 
reason, we should sacrifice our reason with more pro- 
priety to Jupiter or Pallas. To Bacchus is due a liba- 
tion of wine; the same being his gift, as thou preachest. 

Another and a graver question. 

Did Socrates teach thee that " slaves are to be 
scourged, and by no means admonished as though they 
were the children of the master " ? 

Plato. He did not argue upon government. 

Diogenes. He argued upon humanity, whereon all 
government is founded : whatever is beside it is usurpa- 
tion. 

Plato. Are slaves then never to be scourged, what- 
ever be their transgressions and enormities? 

Diogenes. Whatever they be, they are less than his 
who reduced them to their condition. 

Plato. What ! though they murder his whole family ? 

11 God of wine. 

12 Minerva, goddess of wisdom. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 47 * 

Diogenes. Ay, and poison the public fountain of the 
city. 

What am I saying? and to whom? Horrible as is this 
crime, and next in atrocity to parricide, thou deemest it a 
lighter one than stealing a fig or grape. The stealer of 
these is scourged by thee ; the sentence on the poisoner is 
to cleanse out the receptacle. There is, however, a kind 
of poisoning which, to do thee justice, comes before thee 
with all its horrors, and which thou wouldst punish capi- 
tally, even in such personage as an aruspex or diviner : 
I mean the poisoning by incantation. I, and my whole 
family, my whole race, my whole city, may bite the dust 
in agony from a truss of henbane in the well ; and little 
harm done forsooth! Let an idle fool set an image of 
me in wax before the fire, and whistle and caper to it, 
and purr and pray, and chant a hymn to Hecate 13 while 
it melts, entreating and imploring her that I may melt 
as easily, — and thou wouldst, in thy equity and holiness, 
strangle him at the first stave of his psalmody. 

Plato. If this is an absurdity, can you find another? 

Diogenes. Truly, in reading thy book, I doubted at 
first, and for a long continuance, whether thou couldst 
have been serious ; and whether it were not rather a satire 
on those busy-bodies who are incessantly intermeddling 



13 First Witch. Why, how now, Hecate ! You look angerly. 
Hec. Have I not reason, beldams as you are, 
Saucy and overbold? How did you dare 
To trade and traffic with Macbeth 
In riddles and affairs of death? 
And I, the mistress of your charms, 
The close contriver of all harms, 
Was never called to bear my part, 
Or show the glory of our art? 

— Macbeth, Act III, Scene V. 



472 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

in other people's affairs. It was only on the protesta- 
tion of thy intimate friends that I believed thee to have 
written it in earnest. As for thy question, it is idle to 
stoop and pick out absurdities from a mass of inconsist- 
ency and injustice; but another and another I could throw 
in, and another and another afterward, from any page in 
the volume. Two bare, staring falsehoods lift their beaks 
one upon the other, like spring frogs. Thou say est that 
no punishment decreed by the laws tendeth to evil. 
What! if not immoderate? not if partial? Why then 
repeal any penal statute while the subject of its animad- 
version exists? In prisons the less criminal are placed 
among the more criminal, the inexperienced in vice to- 
gether with the hardened in it. This is part of the 
punishment, though it precedes the sentence ; nay, it is 
often inflicted on those whom the judges acquit: the law, 
by allowing it, does it. 

The next is, that he who is punished by the laws is 
the better for it, however the less depraved. What! if 
anteriorly to the sentence he lives and converses with 
worse men, some of whom console him by deadening the 
sense of shame, others by removing the apprehension of 
punishment? Many laws as certainly make men bad, as 
bad men make many laws; yet under thy regimen they 
take us from the bosom of the nurse, turn the meat about 
upon the platter, pull the bed-clothes off, make us sleep 
when we would wake, and wake when we would sleep, 
and never cease to rummage and twitch us, until they see 
us safe landed at the grave. 

Seriously, you who wear embroidered slippers ought 
to be very cautious of treading in the mire. Philosophers 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 473 

should not only live the simplest lives, but should also 
use the plainest language. Poets, in employing magnifi- 
cent and sonorous words, teach philosophy the better by 
thus disarming suspicion that the finest poetry contains 
and conveys the finest philosophy. You will never let 
any man hold his right station : you would rank Solon 
with Homer for poetry. This is absurd. The only re- 
semblance is in both being eminently wise. Pindar, too, 
makes even the cadences of his dithyrambics keep time to 
the flute of Reason. My tub, which holds fifty-fold thy 
wisdom, would crack at the reverberation of thy voice. 
Plato. Farewell. 

Diogenes. I mean that every one of thy whimsies 
hath been picked up somewhere by thee in thy travels ; and 
each of them hath been rendered more weak and puny by 
its place of concealment in thy closet. What thou hast 
written on the immortality of the soul goes rather to 
prove the immortality of the body; and applies as well 
to the body of a weasel or an eel as to the fairer one of 
Agathon 14 or of Aster. 14 Why not at once introduce 
a new religion, since religions keep and are relished in 
proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and 
out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it 
for the center ; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she 
drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras 
felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they 
spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should 
confer it; and that what comprehends the past and the 
future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for- 
ever. " No," cried they, " the power of thinking is no 

14 Greek beauties. 



474 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

more in the brain than in the hair, although the brain 
may be the instrument on which it plays. It is not cor- 
poreal, it is not of this world ; its existence is eternity, its 
residence is infinity." I forbear to discuss the rationality 
of their belief, and pass on straightway to thine; if, in- 
deed, I am to consider as one, belief and doctrine. 

Plato. As you will. 

Diogenes. I should rather, then, regard these things 
as mere ornaments; just as many decorate their apart- 
ments with lyres and harps, which they themselves look 
at from the couch, supinely complacent, and leave for 
visitors to admire and play on. 

Plato. I foresee not how you can disprove my argu- 
ment on the immortality of the soul, 15 which, being con- 
tained in the best of my dialogues, and being often asked 
for among my friends, I carry with me. 

Diogenes. At this time? 

Plato. Even so. 

Diogenes. Give me then a certain part of it for my 
perusal. 

Plato. Willingly. 

Diogenes. Hermes 1S and Pallas ! I wanted but a 
cubit of it, or at most a fathom, and thou art pulling it 
out by the plethron. 

Plato. This is the place in question. 

Diogenes. Read it. 

Plato (reads). " Sayest thou not that death is the 
opposite of life, and that they spring the one from the 
other? " " Yes." " What springs then from the living? " 



15 " Else why this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 

This longing after immortality?" — Addison's Cato. 
18 Mercury. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 475 

"The dead." "And what from the dead ? " " The liv- 
ing." " Then all things alive spring from the dead." 

Diogenes. Why thy repetition? but go on. 

Plato (reads). "Souls therefore exist after death 
in the infernal regions." 

Diogenes. Where is the therefore? where is it even 
as to existence? As to the infernal regions, there is 
nothing that points toward a proof, or promises an in- 
dication. Death neither springs from life, nor life from 
death. Although death is the inevitable consequence of 
life, if the observation and experience of ages go for any- 
thing, yet nothing shows us, or ever hath signified, that 
life comes from death. Thou mightest as well say that 
a barley-corn dies before the germ of another barley- 
corn grows up from it, than which nothing is more un- 
true ; for it is only the protecting part of the germ that 
perishes, when its protection is no longer necessary. The 
consequence, that souls exist after death, cannot be drawn 
from the corruption of the body, even if it were demon- 
strable that out of this corruption a live one could rise 
up. Thou hast not said that the soul is among those 
dead things which living things must spring from ; thou 
hast not said that a living soul produces a dead soul, or 
that a dead soul produces a living one. 

Diogenes. Whatever we cannot account for is in the 
same predicament. We may be gainers by being ignorant 
if we can be thought mysterious. It is better to shake 
our heads and to let nothing out of them, than to be plain 
and explicit in matters of difficulty. I do not mean in 
confessing our ignorance or our imperfect knowledge 
of them, but in clearing them up perspicuously : for, if 
we answer with ease, we may haply be thought good- 



476 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

natured, quick, communicative; never deep, never saga- 
cious; not very defective possibly in our intellectual fac- 
ulties, yet unequal and chinky, and liable to the proba- 
tion 17 of every clown's knuckle. 

Plato. The brightest of stars appear the most un- 
steady and tremulous in their light ; not from any quality 
inherent in themselves, but from the vapors that float 
below, and from the imperfection of vision in the sur- 
veyor. 

Diogenes. Draw thy robe around thee; let the folds 
fall gracefully, and look majestic. That sentence is an 
admirable one ; but not for me. I want sense, not stars. 
What then ? Do no vapors float below the others ? and is 
there no imperfection in the vision of those who look at 
them, if they are the same men, and look the next 
moment ? We must move on : I shall follow the dead 
bodies, and the benighted driver of their fantastic bier, 
close and keen as any hyena. 

Plato. Certainly, O Diogenes, you excel me in eluci- 
dations and similes : mine was less obvious. 18 



17 testing. 

18 As reporter of the speeches in Parliament on great occasions, 
Dr. Johnson is said to have declared that he saw to it, " The Whig 
dogs never got the best of the argument." So, it seems, Landor 
took the same unkindly care of Plato. 



General Lacy and Cura Merino 



Merino. It was God's will. As for those rebels, the 
finger of God 

Lacy. Prythee, Senor Curedo, let God's finger alone. 
Very worthy men are apt to snatch at it upon too light 
occasions : they would stop their tobacco-pipes with it. If 
Spain, in the opinion of our late opponents, could have 
obtained a free Constitution by other means, they never 
would have joined the French. True, they persisted : but 
how few have wisdom or courage enough to make the 
distinction between retracting an error and deserting a 
cause! He who declares himself a party-man, let his 
party profess the most liberal sentiments, is a registered 
and enlisted slave ; he begins by being a zealot and ends 
by being a dupe; he is tormented by regret and anger, 
yet is he as incapable from shame and irresolution of 
throwing off the livery under which he sweats and fumes, 
as was that stronger one, 1 more generously mad, the 
garment 1 empoisoned with the life-blood of the Centaur. 

Merino. How much better is it to abolish parties by 
fixing a legitimate king at the head of affairs ! 

Lacy. The object, thank God, is accomplished. Fer- 
dinand 2 is returning to Madrid, if perverse men do not 
mislead him. 

Merino. And yet there are Spaniards wild enough 
to talk of Cortes and Chambers of Peers. 



1 Hercules, and the robe steeped in the blood of Nessus. 

2 King of Spain returning (1824) to his throne by the aid of a 
French army. 

477 



478 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

Lacy. Of the latter I know nothing; but I know that 
Spain formerly was great, free, and happy, by the ad- 
ministration of her Cortes : and, as I prefer in policy old 
experiments to new, I should not be sorry if the madness, 
as you call it, spread in that direction. 

There are many forms of government, but only two 
kinds ; the free and the despotic : in the one the people 
hath its representatives, in the other not. Freedom, to be, 
must be perfect : the half- free can no more exist, even in 
idea, than the half-entire. Restraints laid by a people on 
itself are sacrifices made to liberty ; and it never exerts a 
more beneficent or a greater power than in imposing 
them. The nation that pays taxes without its own con- 
sent is under slavery : 3 whosoever causes, whosoever 
maintains that slavery, subverts or abets the subversion 
of social order. Whoever is above the law is out of the 
law, just as evidently as whoever is above this room is 
out of this room. If men will outlaw themselves by 
overt acts, we are not to condemn those who remove 
them by the means least hazardous to the public peace. 
If even my daughter brought forth a monster, I could 
not arrest the arm that should smother it : and monsters 
of this kind are by infinite degree less pernicious than 
such as rise up in society by violation of law. 

In regard to a Chamber of Peers, Spain does not 
contain the materials. What has been the education of 
our grandees ? How narrow the space between the horn- 
book i and sanbenito ! 5 The English are amazed, and the 
French are indignant, that we have not imitated their 

3 John Fiske, in his Civil Government. 

4 A first book for children. 

5 A garment worn by persons under trial by the Inquisition 
when they must appear in public. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 479 

Constitutions. All Constitutions formed for the French 
are provisionary. Whether they trip or tumble, whether 
they step or slide, the tendency is direct to slavery; none 
but a most rigid government will restrain them from 
cruelty or from mischief; they are scourged into good 
humor and starved into content. I have read whatever 
I could find on the English Constitution ; and it appears 
to me, like the Deity, an object universally venerated, 
but requiring a Revelation. I do not find the House of 
Peers, as I expected to find it, standing between the 
king and people. Throughout a long series of years, it 
has been only twice in opposition to the Commons : once 
in declaring that the slave-trade ought not to be abol- 
ished ; again in declaring that those who believe in tran- 
substantiation are unfit to command an army or to decide 
a cause. 

Merino. Into what extravagances does infidelity lead 
men, in other things not unwise ! Blessed virgin of the 
thousand pains ! and great Santiago of Compostella ! deign 
to bring that benighted nation back again to the right 
path. 

Lacy. On Deity we reason by attributes ; on govern- 
ment by metaphors. Wool or sand, embodied, may deaden 
the violence of what is discharged against the walls of 
a city : hereditary aristocracy hath no such virtue against 
the assaults of despotism, which on the contrary it will 
maintain in opposition to the people. Since its power 
and wealth, although they are given by the king, must be 
given from the nation, — the one has not an interest in 
enriching it, the other has. All the countries that ever 
have been conquered have been surrendered to the con- 
queror by the aristocracy, stipulating for its own prop- 



4 8o IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

erty, power, and rank, yielding up the men, cattle, and 
metals on the common. Nevertheless, in every nation 
the project of an upper chamber will be warmly cherished. 
The richer aspire to honors, the poorer to protection. 
Every family of wealth and respectability wishes to count 
a peer among its relatives, and, where the whole number 
is yet under nomination, every one may hope it. Those 
who have no occasion for protectors desire the power of 
protecting ; and those who have occasion for them desire 
them to be more efficient. 

Despotism sits nowhere so secure as under the effigy 
and ensigns of Freedom. You would imagine that the 
British peers have given their names to beneficent insti- 
tutions, wise laws, and flourishing colonies : no such 
thing ; instead of which, a slice of meat between two slices 
of bread derives its name from one ; 6 a tumble of heels 
over head, a feat performed by beggar-boys on the roads, 
from another. 7 The former, I presume, was a practical 
commentator on the Roman fable of the belly and the 
members, and maintained with all his power and interest 
the supremacy of the nobler part ; and the latter was of 
a family in which the head never was equivalent to the 
legs. Others divide their titles with a waistcoat, 8 a bon- 
net, 9 and a boot ; 10 the more illustrious with some island 
inhabited by sea-calves. 11 

Merino. I deprecate such importations into our mon- 
archy. God forbid that the ermine of His Catholic Maj- 
esty be tagged with the sordid tail of a monster so rough 
as feudality! 

6 Sandwich. 

7 Somerset. 

8 8 u are left for the " gentle reader." 
10 Lord Bute. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 48 £ 

Lacy. If kings, whether by reliance on external 
force, by introduction of external institutions, or by mis- 
application of what they may possess within the realm, 
show a disposition to conspire with other kings against 
its rights, it may be expected that communities will ( some 
secretly and others openly) unite their moral, their in- 
tellectual, and, when opportunity permits it, their phys- 
ical powers against them. If alliances are holy which 
are entered into upon the soil usurped, surely not unholy 
are those which are formed for defense against all kinds 
and all methods of spoliation. If men are marked out for 
banishment, for imprisonment, for slaughter, because they 
assert the rights and defend the liberties of their country, 
can you wonder at seeing, as you must ere long, a con- 
federacy of free countries, formed for the apprehension 
or extinction of whoever pays, disciplines, or directs, 
under whatsoever title, those tremendous masses of hu- 
man kind which consume the whole produce of their 
native land in depopulating another? Is it iniquitous or 
unnatural that laws be opposed to edicts, and Constitu- 
tions to despotism? O Sefior Merino! there are yet 
things holy : all the barbarians and all the autocrats in 
the universe cannot make that word a byword to the 
Spaniard. Yes, there may be holy alliances ; and the hour 
strikes for their establishment. This beautiful earth, these 
heavens in their magnificence and splendor, have seen 
things more lovely and more glorious than themselves. 
The throne of God is a speck of darkness, if you compare 
it with the heart that beats only and beats constantly to 
pour forth its blood for the preservation of our country ! 
Invincible Spain ! how many of thy children have laid 
this pure sacrifice on the altar ! The Deity hath accepted 
3i 



482 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

it: and there are those who would cast its ashes to the 
winds ! 

If ever a perverseness of character, or the perfidy 
taught in courts, should induce a king of Spain to violate 
his oath, to massacre his subjects, to proscribe his .friends, 
to imprison his defenders, to abolish the representation 
of the people, Spain will be drawn by resentment to do 
what policy in vain has whispered in the ear of gener- 
osity. She and Portugal will be one : nor will she be 
sensible of disgrace in exchanging a prince of French 
origin for a prince of Portuguese. After all there is a 
northwest passage to the golden shores of Freedom ; 
and, if pirates infest the opener seas, brave adventurers 
will cut their way through it. Let kings tremble at 
nothing but their own fraudulence and violence; and 
never at popular assemblies, which alone can direct them 
unerringly. 

Merino. Educated as kings are,, by pious men, serv- 
ants of God, they see a chimera in a popular assembly. 

Lacy. Those who refuse to their people a national 
and just representation, calling it a chimera, will one 
day remember that he who purchases their affections at 
the price of a chimera, purchases them cheaply ; and those 
who, having promised the boon, retract it, will put their 
hand to the signature directed by a hand of iron. State 
after State comes forward in asserting its rights, as wave 
follows wave; each acting upon each; and tlie tempest 
is gathering in regions where no murmur or voice is 
audible. Portugal pants for freedom, in other words is 
free. With one foot in England and the other in Brazil, 12 

12 Portugal for years was ruled from Rio Janeiro, the royal fam- 
ily having been driven from the throne by Bonaparte. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 483 

there was danger in withdrawing either : she appears 
however to have recovered her equipose. Accustomed to 
fix her attention upon England, wisely will she act if she 
imitates her example in the union with Ireland ; 13 a union 
which ought to cause no other regret than in having been 
celebrated so late. If, on the contrary, she believes that 
national power and prosperity are the peculiar gifts of 
independence, she must believe that England was more 
powerful and prosperous in the days of her heptarchy 
than fifty years ago. Algarve would find no more ad- 
vantage in her independence of Portugal, than Portugal 
would find in continuing detached from the other por- 
tions of our peninsula. There were excellent reasons 
for declaring her independence at the time : there now 
are better, if better be possible, for a coalition. She, like 
ourselves, is in danger of losing her colonies : how can 
either party by any other means retrieve its loss? Nor- 
mandy and Brittany, after centuries of war, joined the 
other provinces of France : more centuries of severer 
war would not sunder them. We have no such price to 
pay. Independence is always the sentiment that follows 
liberty ; and it is always the most ardently desired by 
that country which, supposing the administration of law 
to be similar and equal, derives the greatest advantage 
from the union. According to the state of society in two 
countries, to the justice or injustice of government, to 
proximity or distance, independence may be good or bad. 
Normandy and Brittany would have found it hurtful and 
pernicious : they would have been corrupted by bribery, 
and overrun by competitors, the more formidable and the 



In the time of the younger Pitt. 



484 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

more disastrous from a parity of force. They had not, 
however, so weighty reasons for union with France, as 
Portugal has with Spain. 

Merino. To avoid the collision of king and people, 
we may think about an assembly to be composed of the 
higher clergy and principal nobility. 

Lacy. What should produce any collision, any dis- 
sension or dissidence, between king and people? Is the 
wisdom of a nation less than an individual's? Can it 
not see its own interests : and ought he to see any other ? 
Surround the throne with state and splendor and mag- 
nificence, but withhold from it the means of corruption, 
which must overflow upon itself and sap it. To no intent 
or purpose can they ever be employed, unless to subvert 
the Constitution ; and beyond the paling of a Constitution 
a king is fera naturae. 1 * Look at Russia and Turkey: 
how few of their czars and sultans have died a natural 
death ! — unless indeed in such a state of society the most 
natural death is a violent one. I would not accustom 
men to daggers and poisons; for which reason, among 
others, I would remove them as far as possible from 
despotism. 

To talk of France is nugatory: England then, where 
more causes are tried within the year than among us 
within ten, has only twelve judges criminal and civil, 
in her ordinary courts. A culprit, or indeed an innocent 
man, may lie six months in prison before his trial, on sus- 
picion of having stolen a petticoat or pair of slippers. As 
for her civil laws, they are more contradictory, more dila- 
tory, more complicated, more uncertain, more expensive, 



"A wild beast, not entitled to protection. 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 485 

more inhumane, than any now in use among men. 
They who appeal to them for redress of injury suffer an 
aggravation of it ; and when Justice comes down at last, 
she alights on ruins. Public opinion is the only bulwark 
against oppression, and the voice of wretchedness is upon 
most occasions too feeble to excite it. Law in England, 
and in most other countries of Europe, is the crown of 
injustice burning and intolerable as that hammered and 
nailed upon the head of Zekkler, after he had been forced 
to eat the quivering flesh of his companions in insurrec- 
tion. In the statutes of the North American United 
States, there is no such offense as libel upon the Govern- 
ment; because in that country there is no worthless 
wretch whose government leads to, or can be brought into, 
contempt. This undefined and undefinable offense in 
England hath consigned many just men and eminent 
scholars to poverty and imprisonment, to incurable mal- 
adies, and untimely death. Law, like the Andalusian 
bull, lowers her head and shuts her eyes before she makes 
her push ; and either she misses her object altogether, or 
she leaves it immersed in bloodshed. 

When an action is brought by one subject against 
another, in which he seeks indemnity for an injury done 
to his property, his comforts, or his character, a jury 
awards the amount; but if some parasite of the king 
wishes to mend his fortune, after a run of bad luck at 
the gaming-table or of improvident bets on the race- 
course, he informs the attorney-general that he has de- 
tected a libel on Majesty which, unless it be chastised 
and checked by the timely interference of those blessed 
institutions whence they are great and glorious, would 
leave no man's office, or honor, or peace inviolable. It 



486 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

may happen that the writer, at worst, hath indulged his 
wit on some personal fault, some feature in the character 
far below the crown : this is enough for a prosecution ; 
and the author, if found guilty, lies at the mercy of the 
judge. The jury in this case is never the awarder of 
damages. Are then the English laws equal for all? 
Recently there was a member of Parliament who de- 
clared to the people such things against the Government 
as were openly called seditious and libelous, both by his 
colleagues and his judges. He was condemned to pay a 
fine, amounting to less than the three-hundredth part of 
his property, and to be confined for three months — in 
an apartment more airy and more splendid than any in 
his own house. Another, no member of Parliament, wrote 
something ludicrous about Majesty, and was condemned, 
he and his brother, to pay the full half of their property, 
and to be confined among felons for two years ! This 
confinement was deemed so flagrantly cruel, that the mag- 
istrates soon afterward allowed a little more light, a 
little more air, and better company; not, however, in 
separate wards, but separate prisons. The judge who 
pronounced the sentence is still living; he lives unbruised, 
unbranded, and he appears like a man among men. 

Merino. Why not? He proved his spirit, firmness, 
and fidelity : in our country he would be appointed grand 
inquisitor on the next vacancy, and lead the queen to her 
seat at the first auto da fe. 15 Idlers and philosophers may 
complain ; but certainly this portion of the English in- 
stitutions ought to be commended warmly by every true 

15 The public declaration of the judgment passed on accused 
persons tried before the courts of the Spanish Inquisition, and by 
extension the infliction of the penalty. 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 487 

Spaniard, every friend to the altar and the throne. And 
yet, General, you mention it in such a manner as would 
almost let a careless, inattentive hearer go away with the 
persuasion that you disapprove of it. Speculative and 
dissatisfied men are existing in all countries, even in 
Spain and England ; but we have scourges in store for 
the pruriency of dissatisfaction, and cases and caps for 
the telescopes of speculation. 

Lacy. The faultiness of the English laws is not com- 
plained of nor pointed out exclusively by the speculative 
or the sanguine, by the oppressed or the disappointed; 
it was the derision and scoff of George the Second, 16 
one of the bravest and most constitutional kings. " As 
to our laws," said he, " we pass near a hundred every 
session, which seem made for no other purpose but to 
afford us the pleasure of breaking them." 

This is not reported by Whig or Tory, who change 
principles 17 as they change places, but by a dispassionate, 
unambitious man of sound sense and in easy circum- 
stances, a personal and intimate friend of the king, from 
whose lips he himself received it — Lord Waldegrave. 
Yet an Englishman thinks himself quite as free, and gov- 
erned quite as rationally, as a citizen of the United States : 
so does a Chinese. Such is the hemlock that habitude 
administers to endurance ; and so long is it in this torpor 
ere the heart sickens. 

I am far from the vehemence of the English com- 
mander, Nelson 18 — a man, however, who betrayed 



16 The last English king who led an army. 

17 Conservative in office ; radical, out. 

18 There is no greater name in the bloody story of naval war- 
fare. 



488 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

neither in war nor policy any deficiency of acuteness and 
judgment. He says unambiguously and distinctly in his 
letters, " All ministers of kings and princes are, in my 
opinion, as great scoundrels as ever lived." 

Versatility, indecision, falsehood, and ingratitude, had 
strongly marked, as he saw, the two principal ones of his 
country, Pitt and Fox ; the latter of whom openly turned 
honesty into derision, while the former sent it wrapped 
up decently to market. Now if all ministers of kings 
and princes are, what the admiral calls them from his 
experience, " as great scoundrels as ever lived," we must 
be as great fools as ever lived if we endure them: we 
should look for others. 

Merino. Even that will not do: the new ones, pos- 
sessing the same power and the same places, will be the 
same men. 

Lacy. I am afraid then the change must not be only 
in the servants, but in the masters, and that we must not 
leave the choice to those who always choose " as great 
scoundrels as ever lived." Nelson was a person who had 
had much to do with the ministers of kings and princes; 
none of his age had more, — an age in which the ministers 
had surely no less to do than those in any other age since 
the creation of the world. He was the best commander of 
his nation ; he was consulted and employed in every diffi- 
cult and doubtful undertaking: he must have known 
them thoroughly. What meaning, then, shall we attrib- 
ute to his words ? Shall we say that " as great scoun- 
drels as ever lived " ought to govern the universe in per- 
petuity? Or can we doubt that they must do so, if we 
suffer kings and princes to appoint them at each other's 
recommendation ? 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 489 

Merino. Nelson was a heretic, a blasphemer, a revo- 
lutionist. 

Lacy. On heresy and blasphemy I am incapable of 
deciding; but never was there a more strenuous antago- 
nist of revolutionary principles ; and upon this rock his 
glory split and foundered. When Sir William Hamil- 
ton 19 declared to the Neapolitan insurgents, who had laid 
down their arms before royal promises, that, his Govern- 
ment having engaged with the Allied Powers to eradicate 
revolutionary doctrines from Europe, he could not coun- 
tenance the fulfillment of a capitulation which opposed 
the views of the coalition, what did Nelson? He tar- 
nished the brightest sword in Europe, and devoted to the 
most insatiable of the Furies the purest blood ! A Caro- 
line and a Ferdinand, 20 the most opprobrious of the hu- 
man race and among the lowest in intellect, were per- 
mitted to riot in the slaughter of a Caraccioli. 

The English Constitution, sir, is founded on revolu- 
tionary doctrines, and her kings acknowledge it. Recol- 
lect now the note of her diplomatist. Is England in 
Europe? If she is, which I venture not to assert, her 
rulers have declared their intention to eradicate the foun- 
dations of her liberties ; and they have broken their word 
so often that I am inclined to believe they will attempt to 
recover their credit by keeping it strictly here. But the 
safest and least costly conquests for England would be 
those over the understandings and the hearts of men. 
They require no garrisons ; they equip no navies ; they 



10 English minister at Naples. 

20 " In June and July, 1799, I went to Naples, and, as his Sicilian 
Majesty is pleased to say, reconquered his kingdom and placed him 
on his throne." — Memoirs of Nelson's Services, 



490 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

encounter no tempests: they withdraw none from labor; 
they might extend from the arctic to the antarctic circle, 
leaving every Briton at his own fireside; and Earth like 
Ocean would have her great Pacific. The strength of 
England lies not in armaments and invasions : it lies in 
the omnipresence of her industry, and in the vivifying 
energies of her high civilization. There are provinces she 
cannot grasp ; there are islands she cannot hold fast ; but 
there is neither island nor province, there is neither king- 
dom nor continent, which she could not draw to her side 
and fix there everlastingly, by saying the magic words, 
Be Free. Every land wherein she favors the sentiments 
of freedom, every land wherein she but forbids them to 
be stifled, is her own ; a true ally, a willing tributary, an 
inseparable friend. Principles hold those together whom 
power could only alienate. 

Merino. I understand little these novel doctrines ; but 
Democracy herself must be contented with the principal 
features of the English Constitution. The great leaders 
are not taken from the ancient families. 

Lacy. These push forward into Parliament young 
persons of the best talents they happen to pick up, whether 
at a ball or an opera, at a gaming-table or a college-mess, 
who from time to time, according to the offices they have 
filled, mount into the 1 upper chamber and make room for 
others ; but it is understood that, in both chambers, they 
shall distribute honors and places at the command of their 
patrons. True, indeed, the ostensible heads are not of 
ancient or even of respectable parentage. The more 
wealthy and powerful peers send them from their 
boroughs into the House of Commons, as they send race- 
horses from their stables to Newmarket, and cocks from 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 491 

their training-yard to Doncaster. This is, in like man- 
ner, a pride, a luxury, a speculation. Even bankrupts 
have been permitted to sit there ; men who, when they 
succeeded, were a curse to their country worse than when 
they failed. 

Let us rather collect together our former institutions, 
cherish all that brings us proud remembrances, brace our 
limbs for the efforts we must make, train our youth on 
our own arena, and never deem it decorous to imitate 
the limp of a wrestler writhing in his decrepitude. 

The Chamber of Peers in England is the dormitory of 
freedom and of genius. Those who enter it have eaten 
the lotus, 21 and forget their country. A minister, to suit 
his purposes, may make a dozen or a score or a hundred 
of peers in a day. If they are rich they are inactive ; if 
they are poor they are dependent. In general he chooses 
the rich, who always want something; for wealth is less 
easy to satisfy than poverty, luxury than hunger. He can 
dispense with their energy if he can obtain their votes, and 
they never abandon him unless he has contented them. 

Merino. Impossible! that any minister should make 
twenty, or even ten peers, during one convocation. 

Lacy. The English, by a most happy metaphor, call 
them batches, seeing so many drawn forth at a time, with 
the rapidity of loaves from an oven, and molded to the 
same ductility by less manipulation. A minister in that 
system has equally need of the active and the passive, as 
the creation has equally need of males and females. Do 
not imagine I would discredit or depreciate the House of 
Peers. Never will another land contain one composed of 



21 Like Dr. Johnson, in one of his pleasant halting places in the 
Hebrides. 



492 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

characters in general more honorable ; more distinguished 
for knowledge, for charity, for generosity, for equity; 
more perfect in all the duties of men and citizens. Let 
it stand; a nation should be accustomed to no changes, 
to no images but of strength and duration: let it stand, 
then, as a lofty and ornamental belfry, never to be taken 
down or lowered, until it threatens by its decay the con- 
gregation underneath; but let none be excommunicated 
who refuse to copy it, whether from faultiness in their 
foundation or from deficiency in their materials. Differ- 
ent countries require different governments. Is the rose 
the only flower in the garden ? Is Hesperus the only star 
in the heavens? We may be hurt by our safeguards, 
if we try new ones. 

Don Britomarte Delciego took his daily siesta on the 
grass in the city-dyke of Barbastro : he shaded his face 
with his sombrero, and slept profoundly. One day, un- 
fortunately, a gnat alighted on his nose and bit it. Don 
Britomarte roused himself; and, remembering that he 
could enfold his arms in his mantle, took off a glove and 
covered the unprotected part with it. Satisfied at the 
contrivance, he slept again; and more profoundly than 
ever. Whether there was any savory odor in the glove 
I know not : certain is is that some rats came from under 
the fortifications, and, perforating the new defense of 
Don Britomarte, made a breach in the salient angle which 
had suffered so lately by a less potent enemy; and he 
was called from that day forward the knight of the kid- 
skin visor. 

Merino. Sir, I do not understand stories: I never 
found wit or reason in them. 

Lacy. England in the last twenty years has under- 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 493 

gone a greater revolution than any she struggled to 
counteract — a revolution more awful, more pernicious. 
She alone of all the nations in the world hath suffered by 
that of France : she is become less wealthy by it, less free, 
less liberal, less moral. Half a century ago she was 
represented chiefly by her country-gentlemen. Pitt made 
the richer, peers; the intermediate, pensioners; the poorer, 
exiles ; and his benches were overflowed with " honor- 
ables " from the sugar-cask 22 and indigo-bag. He 
changed all the features both of mind and matter. Old 
mansions were converted into workhouses and barracks: 
children who returned from school at the holidays stopped 
in their own villages, and asked why they stopped. More 
oaks 23 followed him than ever followed Orpheus ; and 
more stones, a thousand to one, leaped down at his voice 
than ever leaped up at Amphion's. 24 Overladen with 
taxation, the gentlemen of England — a class the grand- 
est in character that ever existed upon earth, the best 
informed, the most generous, the most patriotic — were 
driven from their residences into cities. Their authority 
ceased ; their example was altogether lost, and it appears 
by the calendars of the prisons, that two thirds of the 
offenders were from the country ; whereas until these 
disastrous times four fifths were from the towns. To 
what a degree those of the towns themselves must have 
increased, may be supposed by the stagnation in many 



23 Not the last illustration of the political power of sugar. 
23 " He breathed his sorrows in a desert cave, 

And soothed the tiger, moved the oak, with song." 

— Landor. 
21 When Amphion played upon his lyre, stones leaped up and 
took their places in the wall building around Thebes. 



494 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

trades, and by the conversion of laborers and artisans to 
soldiers. 

The country gentlemen, in losing their rank and con- 
dition, lost the higher and more delicate part of their 
principles. There decayed at once in them that robust- 
ness and that nobility of character, which men, like trees, 
acquire from standing separately. Deprived of their 
former occupations and amusements, and impatient of 
inactivity, they condescended to be members of gaming 
clubs in the fashionable cities, incurred new and worse 
expenses, and eagerly sought, from among the friend- 
ships they had contracted, those who might obtain for 
them or for their families some atom from the public 
dilapidation. Hence nearly all were subservient to the 
minister: those who were not were marked out as dis- 
affected to the Constitution, or at best as singular men 
who courted celebrity from retirement. 

Such was the state of the landed interest; and what 
was that of the commercial? Industrious tradesmen 
speculated; in other words, gamed. Bankers were coin- 
ers; not giving a piece of metal, but a scrap of paper. 
They who had thousands lent millions, and lost all. Slow 
and sure gains were discreditable! and nothing was a 
sight more common, more natural, or seen with more 
indifference, than fortunes rolling down from their im- 
mense accumulation. Brokers and insurers and jobbers, 
people whose education could not have been liberal, were 
now for the first time found at the assemblies and at the 
tables of the great, and were treated there with the first 
distinction. Every hand through which money passes 
was pressed affectionately. The viler part of what is 
democratical was supported by the aristocracy ; the better 



WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR 495 

of what is republican was thrown down. England, like 
one whose features are just now turned awry by an apo- 
plexy, is ignorant of the change she has undergone, and 
is the more lethargic the more she is distorted. Not only 
hath she lost her bloom and spirit, but her form and gait, 
her voice and memory. The weakest of mortals was 
omnipotent in Parliament; and being so, he dreamed in 
his drunkenness that he could compress the spirit of the 
times ; and before the fumes had passed away, he ren- 
dered the wealthiest of nations the most distressed. The 
spirit of the times is only to be made useful by catching 
it as it rises, to be managed only by concession, to be 
controlled only by compliancy. Like the powerful agent 25 
of late discovery, that impels vast masses across the ocean 
or raises them from the abysses of the earth, it performs 
everything by attention, nothing by force, and is fatal 
alike from coercion and from neglect. That government 
is the best which the people obey the most willingly and 
the most wisely ; that state of society in which the great- 
est number may live and educate their families becom- 
ingly, by unstrained bodily and unrestricted intellectual 
exertion : where superiority in office springs from worth, 
and where the chief magistrate hath no higher interest 
in perspective than the ascendency of the laws. Nations 
are not ruined by war : for convents and churches, pal- 
aces and cities, are not nations. The Messenians and 
Jews and Araucanians saw their houses and temples 
leveled with the pavement ; the mightiness of the crash 
gave the stronger mind a fresh impulse, and it sprang 
high above the flames that consumed the last fragment. 

25 Steam. 



496 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

The ruin of a country is not the blight of corn, or the 
weight and impetuosity of hailstones; it is not inunda- 
tion or storm, it is not pestilence or famine : a few years, 
perhaps a single one, may cover all traces of such calam- 
ity. But that country is too surely ruined in which 
morals are lost irretrievably to the greater part of the 
rising generation; and there are they about to sink and 
perish, where the ruler has given, by an unrepressed and 
an unreproved example, the lesson of bad faith. 

Merino. Sir, I cannot hear such language. 

Lacy. Why then converse with me? Is the fault 
mine if such language be offensive? Why should intol- 
erance hatch an hypothesis, or increase her own alarm 
by the obstreperous chuckle of incubation? 

Merino. Kings stand in the place of God among us. 

Lacy. I wish they would make way for the owner. 
They love God only when they fancy he has favored their 
passions, and fear him only when they must buy him off. 
If indeed they be his vicegerents on earth, let them repress 
the wicked and exalt the virtuous. Wherever in the ma- 
terial world there is a grain of gold, it sinks to the 
bottom ; chaff floats over it : in the animal, the greatest 
and most sagacious of creatures hide themselves in woods 
and caverns, in morasses and solitudes, and we hear first 
of their existence when we find their bones. Do you 
perceive a resemblance anywhere? If princes are desir- 
ous to imitate the Governor of the universe; if they are 
disposed to obey him ; if they consult religion or reason, 
or, what oftener occupies their attention, the stability of 
power, — 'they will admit the institutions best adapted to 
render men honest and peaceable, industrious and con- 
tented. Otherwise let them be certain that, although 



WALTER SAVAGE LAN DOR 497 

they themselves may escape the chastisement they merit, 
their children and grandchildren will never be out of 
danger or out of fear. Calculations on the intensity of 
force are often just ; hardly ever so those on its durability. 

Merino. As if truly that depended on men ! — a 
blow against a superintending Providence! It always 
follows the pestilential breath that would sully the maj- 
esty of kings. 

Lacy. Seiior Merino, my name, if you have forgotten 
it, is Lacy : take courage and recollect yourself. The 
whole of my discourse hath tended to keep the majesty 
of kings unsullied, by preserving their honor inviolate. 
Any blow against a superintending Providence is too 
insane for reproach, too impotent for pity : and indeed 
what peril can by any one be apprehended from the 
Almighty, when he has Cura Merino to preach for him, 
and the Holy Inquisition to protect him? 

Merino. I scorn the sneer, sir; and know not by 
what right, or after what resemblance, you couple my 
name with the Holy Inquisition which our Lord the King 
in his wisdom hath not yet re-established, and which the 
Holy Allies for the greater part have abolished in their 
dominions. 

Lacy. This never would have been effected if the 
holy heads of the meek usurpers 26 had not raised them- 
selves above the crown ; proving from doctors and con- 
fessors, from Old Testament and New, the privilege they 
possessed of whipping and burning and decapitating the 
wearer. The kings in their fright ran against the chalice 
of poison, by which many thousands of their subjects had 



2li Heads of the Inquisition. 
32 



498 IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS 

perished, and by which their own hands were, after their 
retractings and writhings, ungauntleted, undirked, and 
paralyzed. 

Europe, Asia, America, sent up simultaneously to 
heaven, a shout of joy at the subversion. Africa, seated 
among tamer monsters and addicted to milder supersti- 
tions wondered at what burst and dayspring of beati- 
tude the human race was celebrating around her so high 
and enthusiastic a jubilee. 

Merino. I take my leave, General. May your Excel- 
lency live many years ! 

I breathe the pure street-air again. Traitor and 
atheist; I will denounce him. He has shaved for the 
last time : he shall never have Christian burial. 




WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. 

1770-1850. 

A striking contrast will present itself, if we bring 
together in our thought the lives of Keats, Burns, Shelley, 
and Byron, heroically crowded with labors and seasoned 
with misery, and that of Wordsworth, — four-score years, 
and the consequent ample time for the full ripening of 
his faculties, the perfect growth of his genius ; and long 
before the sear and yellow leaf, and during its happy 
period long drawn out : — 

" That which should accompany old age, 
As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends." 

We have read how Shakespeare's senses were culti- 
vated by the beautiful scenery in which he lived. So 
was it with Wordsworth. The same cause acted power- 
fully upon his mind and stored it with images which 
all his life not only — 

" Flashed upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude," 

but they irradiate his poetry and charm the esthetic 
nature of his readers, including his large following of 
pupil-poets in England and America. 

In his poems he names some of the books he loved 
and fed on ; the writings of Fielding, Cervantes, Le 
Sage, Swift. He went to college and excelled in the 
classics. He gained all the benefits to be drawn from 
foreign travel. A list of his acquaintances — friends 
like De Quincey and enemies like Jeffrey — would in- 

5°* 



502 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 

elude all the prominent English writers of his long day. 
His sister Dorothy was not only a sister, but an effect- 
ive helper in his literary work. 

Wordsworth's poems fill many volumes. As with 
Shelley and even with Milton, his shorter poems are the 
best known. The one here presented he never excelled, 
but how few poems of its length, whoever the writer, 
deserve a place above it! 

It seems to me that Wordsworth stands fourth, if 
not third, in the roll of authors from whose lines apt and 
beautiful quotations are borrowed, ready to point a 
moral or adorn a tale. 

" The light that never was on sea, or land." 

" A creature, not too bright or good." 

" A perfect woman, nobly planned." 

" I wandered lonely as a cloud." 

" Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns." 

" We see into the life of things." 

" Pious beyond the intention of your thought." 

" The child is father of the man." 

" A primrose by a river's brim." 

" The vision and the faculty divine." 

And so on, and so on. 

Like Coleridge, an apostle of human liberty, and like 
him, shocked to the soul by the excesses of the French 
Revolution, Wordsworth became a conservative ; a Tory, 
I think, he was called. 

This will explain but hardly justify the fine but re- 
proachful sonnets of which he was the subject, written 
by Shelley, Browning, and, perhaps others, 

" For oh, this world and the wrong it does ! " 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 503 

The " wrong - ," however, in Wordsworth's case was 
slight. He was securely placed behind the barricade of 
his sublime confidence in himself and in his theories of 
poetic art. 

In 1843, he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate and 
remained in this post of honor till his death, which sad 
event, it is interesting to notice, occurred on the anni- 
versary of the birth and death of Shakespeare. 

TO WORDSWORTH. 

" Poet of Nature, thou hast wept to know 
That things depart which never may return; 
Childhood and youth, friendship and love's first glow, 
Have fled like sweet dreams, leaving thee to mourn. 
These common woes I feel. One loss is mine, 
Which thou too feel'st, yet I alone deplore ; 
Thou wert as a lone star whose light did shine 
On some frail bark in winter's midnight roar; 
Thou hast like to a rock-built refuge stood 
Above the blind and battling multitude; 
In honored poverty thy voice did weave 
Songs consecrate to truth ^nd liberty ; — 
Deserting these, thou leavest me to grieve, 
Thus having been that thou shouldst cease to be." 

— SJiclley. 

" Take up a poem of Wordsworth and read it, — I 
would rather say read them all; and I will then appeal 
to you whether any poet of our country, since Milton, 
hath exerted greater powers with less of strain and less 
of ostentation." — Landor. 



Ode 



Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of 
Early Childhood. 

The child is father of the man ; 
And I could wish my days to be 
Bound each to each by natural piety. 

I. 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 
To me did seem 
Appareled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. s 

It is not now as it hath been of yore ;* — 
Turn wheresoe'er I may, 
By night or day, 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

II. 

The Rainbow comes and goes, ,0 

And lovely is the Rose; 
The Moon doth with delight 
Look round her when the heavens are bare; 
Waters on a starry night 

Are beautiful and fair; ,s 

The sunshine is a glorious birth; 



As it was in my youth. 



505 



506 ODE ON IMMORTALITY 

But yet I know where'er I go, 
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. 

III. 

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song, 

And while the young lambs bound 20 

As to the tabor's sound, 
To me alone there came a thought of grief : 
A timely utterance gave that thought relief, 

And I again am strong: 
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; 2S 
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; 
I hear the echoes through the mountains throng, 
The winds come to me from the fields of sleep, 2 
And all the air is gay; 

Land and sea 30 

Give themselves up to jollity, 
And with the heart of May 
Doth every beast keep holiday ; — 
Thou Child of Joy, 
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy 3S 
Shepherd-boy ! 

IV. 

Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call. 

Ye to each other make ; I see 
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; 
My heart is at your festival, 

My head hath its coronal, 4 ° 

The fulness of your bliss, I feel, I feel it all. 
O evil day! if I were sullen 



The country around still and quiet. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 



507 



While Earth herself is adorning, 3 

This sweet May morning, 
And the Children are culling 4S 

On every side, 
In a thousand valleys far and wide, 
Fresh flowers ; while the sun shines warm, 
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm : — 

I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! 5 ° 

— But there's a Tree, of many, one, 
A single Field which I have looked upon, 
Both of them speak of something that is gone : 
The pansy at my feet 

Doth the same tale repeat : ss 

Whither is fled the visionary 4 gleam ? 
Where is it now, the glory and the dream? 

V. 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 6o 

And cometh from afar: 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory, do we come 

From God, who is our home : 6s 

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 



3 Used intransitively or reflexively. 

4 The gleam is like a vision. Wordsworth speaks elsewhere of 
recollected hours that have the charm of visionary things." 



508 ODE ON IMMORTALITY 

He sees it in his joy ; 7 ° 

The Youth, who daily farther from the East 

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended; 
At length the Man perceives it die away, 7S 

And fade into the light of common day. 

VI. 

Earth fills her lap* with pleasures of her own ; 

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, 

And, even with something of a Mother's mind, 

And no unworthy aim, 8o 

The homely Nurse doth all she can 

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, 
Forget the glories he hath known, 

And that imperial palace whence he came. 5 

VII. 

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, 8s 

A six years' Darling of a pigmy size ! 

See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, 

Fretted 6 by sallies of his mother's kisses, 

With light upon him from his father's eyes ! 

8 The heaven that preceded earth. 
" I remember, I remember, 

The fir trees dark and high : 

I used to think their slender tops 

Were close against the sky. 

" It was a childish ignorance, 
But now 'tis little joy 
To know I'm farther off from heaven 

Than when I was a boy." — Thomas Hood. 
8 teased. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 509 

See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, 90 

Some fragment from his dream of human life, 
Shaped by himself with newly learned art; 

A wedding or a festival, 

A mourning or a funeral ; 

And this hath now his heart, 95 

And unto this he frames his song : T 
Then will he fit his tongue 
To dialogues of business, love, or strife ; 

But it will not be long 

Ere this be thrown aside, I0 ° 

And with new joy and pride 
The little Actor cons 8 another part ; 
Filling from time to time his " humorous 9 stage " 
With all the Persons, 10 down to palsied Age, 
That Life brings with her in her equipage; 10S 

As if his whole vocation 

Were endless imitation. 

VIII. 

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie 

Thy Soul's immensity ; 
Thou best Philosopher who yet dost keep ,I0 

Thy heritage, thou Eye " among the blind, 
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep, 
Haunted forever by the eternal mind, — 

Mighty Prophet! Seer blest! 



7 tells his story. 

8 learns. 

capricious. 

10 characters. 

11 Alluding to the child's constant looking. 



510 ODE ON IMMORTALITY 

On whom those truths do rest, "5 

Which we are toiling all our lives to find, 
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave; 
Thou, over whom thy Immortality 
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave, 
A Presence which is not to be put by ; I20 

Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might 
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height, 
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke 12 
The years to bring the inevitable yoke, 
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife ? I2S 

Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, 13 
And custom 1 4 lie upon thee with a weight, 
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life ! 

IX. 

O joy! that in our embers 

Is something that doth live, I3 ° 

15 That Nature yet remembers 

What was so fugitive ! 
The thought 16 of our past years in me doth breed 
Perpetual benediction : 17 not indeed 
For that which is most worthy to be blest ; I3S 

Delight and liberty, the simple creed 
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest, 
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast : 

Not for these I raise 



12 invite, exhort. 

13 cares. 

14 All the trammels that society will place upon him. 

15 " Joy " again. 
18 recollection. 

17 blessing, or thanksgiving. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 51 1 

The song of thanks and praise ; ho 

18 But for those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 

Fallings from us, vanishings; 
Blank misgivings of a Creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized, J 4S 

High instincts before which our mortal Nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised : 
But for those first affections, 
Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, x s° 

Are yet the fountain light of all our day, 
Are yet a master light of all our seeing; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence : truths that wake, 

To perish never; 
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, 

Nor Man nor Boy, 
Nor all that is at enmity with joy, 

Can utterly abolish or destroy! l6 ° 

Hence in a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 19 
Which brought us hither, 
Can in a moment travel thither, l6s 



18 In this oft-quoted passage, does not the poet slip into prose? 
And what a return in line 147 ! 

1D " Yet, by some subtler touch of sympathy, 
These primal apprehensions, dimly stirred, 
Perplex the eye with pictures from within. 
This hath made poets dream of lives foregone 
Into worlds fantastical, more fair than ours." 

— Lowell, The Cathedral. 



512 ODE ON IMMORTALITY 

And see the Children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 

X. 

Then sing, ye Birds, sing, sing a joyous song! 

And let the young Lambs bound 

As to the tabor's sound ! 1 7° 

We in thought will join your throng, 

Ye that pipe and ye that play, 

Ye that through your hearts to-day 

Feel the gladness of the May! 
What though the radiance which was once so bright X 7S 
Be now forever taken from my sight, 

Though nothing can bring back the hour 
Of splendor in the grass,, of glory in the flower; 

We will grieve not, rather find 

Strength in what remains behind; l8 ° 

In the primal sympathy 

Which, having been, must ever be; 

In the soothing thoughts that spring 

Out of human suffering; 

In the faith that looks through death, 
In years 20 that bring the philosophic mind. 

XL 

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves, 
Forbode not any severing of our loves ! 
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might ; 



" Till old experience do attain 

To something like prophetic strain." — II Penseroso. 
" 'Tis the sunset of life gives me mystical lore." — Campbell. 



WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 513 

I only have relinquished one delight x 9° 

To live beneath your more habitual sway. 

I love the Brooks which down their channels fret, 

Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; 

The innocent brightness of a new-born Day 

Is lovely yet ; I9S 

The Clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from an eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality ; 
Another race hath been, and other palms are won. 
Thanks to the human heart by which we live, 200 

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, 
To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. 21 



21 " To that dream-like vividness and splendor which invest ob- 
jects of sight in childhood, every one, I believe, if he would look 
back, could bear testimony, and I need not dwell upon it here ; but 
having in the poem regarded it as a presumptive evidence of a prior 
state of existence, I think it right to protest against a conclusion 
which has given pain to some good and pious persons, that I meant 
to inculcate such a belief. It is far too shadowy a notion to be 
recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of 
immortality." — Wordsworth. 

Wordsworth also informs his readers that two years passed be- 
tween the writing of the first four stanzas and the remaining part 
of the Ode. 



33 



Index 



Addison, 65, 459, 474. 

Adonais, 334, 335. 

Albion, 7. 

Alexander, 459. 

Alfieri, 38. 

Alps, 18, 25. 

Alva, 71. 

Angelo, 38. 

Anne, Queen, 74. 

Apennine, 44. 

April, 43. 

Ariosto, 36. 

Arqua, 33. 

Arno, 37, 40. 

Armada, 62. 

Art, 40. 

Ascham, 78. 

Bacon, Francis, 359. 

Bagpipe, 129. 

Battle of Waterloo, 10-12. 

Beattie, 336. 

Bedford, Duke of, 359. 

Beggars, 149. 

Belgium, 10. 

Blanc, Mont, 54. 

Boccaccio, 39. 

Boethius, 76. 

Boileau, 35. 

Bonaparte, 211, 248. 

Books, 138. 

Bosporus, 60. 

Boswell, 65, 151, 158, 165. 

Bourbon, House of, 220, 235, 

239. 
Bridge of Sighs, 29. 
Browning, 54, 261, 392. 
Bryant, 422. 
Burke, 80, 209. 



Burns, quoted, 132, 344. 

Byron, first published poem, 3 ; 
prominent works, 4 ; death, 
5; quoted, 10, 13, 24, 34, 
38, 39, 40, 45, 49, 59, 79, 
163, 1 79> !86, 205, 242, 251. 

Campbell, quoted, 227, 512. 

Canova, 38. 

Chaucer, 176, 314. 

Chatham, 209. 

Chatterton, 350. 

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 7. 

Christ's Hospital, 319. 

Christabel, 173. 

Clarens, 23. 

Coblentz, 15. 

Col, island, 149; harvest, 150; 

village, 153. 
Coleridge (quoted, 54, 421), 

sketch, 171, 199. 
Coliseum, 52. 
Congreve, 305. 
Cromwell, 46, 83, 242. 
Cuckoo, 374. 
Culloden, 108, 121. 
Cybele, 29. 

Dante, 39, 421. 
David, 264. 
Day, 33. 

Dream Children, 320. 
Diana, 55. 
Diogenes, 14, 459. 
Druids, 427. 
Dryden. 336. 394. 
Dionysius, 463. 



Earthquake, 41. 



5'5 



5i6 



INDEX 



Ehrenbreitstein, 16. 
Elf-bolts, 1 05. 
Elia, 288. 

Elizabeth, Queen, 73. 
Emerson, 9, 315. 
" Emigrants," French, 233. 
Emigration to America, 103, 124. 
England, 77. 

Erse, songs, 103; language, 112; 
translations, 144. 

Fiske, John, 478. 
Fingal, 141. 
Flora, vows to, 115. 
Florence, 39. 
Fox, C. J., 207. 
Froude, quoted, 71. 

Galileo, 38. 
Gebir, 435. 
Geraldine, 177. 
Genesis, 401. 
Gladiator, 53. 
Goldsmith, 119. 
Goshen, 302. 
Grace Before Meat, 310. 
Gray, 17, 336, 427. 
Green, 82, 301, 446. 
Grotius, 416. 

Halleck, quoted, 345, iv. 

Harvest song, 104. 

Hawthorne, 52, 292, 294. 

Hannibal, 40. 

Hebrides, 69, 109, 127. 

Hebrum, 427. 

Hecate, 471. 

Helen Hunt, quoted, 202. 

Highlands, state of, 122; sol- 
diers to America, 127 ; 
horses, 145. 

Hood, 508. 

Holmes, O. W., quoted, 8, 176. 

Horace, 45. 

Hyacinth, 429. 

Humble-bee, humble-cows, 115. 

Hunt, Leigh, 347. 

Hut, Highland, 86, 146. 



Immortality, Ode on, 505. 
Iona, 159, 160, 161. 
Ireland, 247. 
Ierne, 345. 
Iris, 44. 
Italia, 26, 36. 

James V., of Scotland, 107. 

John of Gaunt, 446. 

Johnson, 65, 96, 208, 316, 391, 

423, 476. 
Jura, 19, 21. 

Keats, quoted, 431. 

Keppel,- Lord, 411, 412, 413, 418. 

Kirk, of Scotland, 129. 

Knox, 71. 

La Fayette, 417. 

Lamb, 287. 

Landor, 421, 435, 436, 493, 503. 

Laureate, 136. 

Lausanne, 25. 

Leman, 19. 

Longfellow, quoted, 291, 410. 

Lotus, no, 491. 

Louis XIV., 220. 

Louis XVI., 409. 

Lowell, quoted, 17, 45, 48, 57, 

203, 422, 511. 
Lowlanders, 142. 
Lucan* 351. 
Lycidas, 423, 425. 

McCall, 357. 

McDonald, Flora, 108. 

Macaulay, quoted, 66, 67, 316. 

Macbeth, 82. 

Macpherson, 139, 140, 141. 

Marlborough, 256. 

Martial Law, 247. 

Marvel, 291. 

Mary, Queen, 70, 73. 

Meter, 174. 

Milton, quoted, 9, 18, 27, 187, 

329, 369, 386. 
Money, 136. 



INDEX 



5*7 



Monroe Doctrine, 230. 

Montaigne, 352. 

Motley, 416. 

Muck, island, 109. 

Muscovy, 112. 

Napolean, 13, 14. 

Nassau, House of, 417. 

Nature, 9, 18, 19. 

Nelson, 489. 

New Year's eve, 153, 325. 

Niobe, 46. 

North, Lord, 369. 

Nova Scotia, 125. 

Ocean, 7, 61, 63, 107. 

Orpheus, 427. 

Ossian, 137, 139, 140, 141. 

Paine, 417. 

Painter, 333. 

Palinurus, 369. 

Paradise Lost, 422. 

Parish, 145. 

Peat, 129. 

Petrarch, 39. 

Phlegethon, 43. 

Plato, 459. 

Poland, 227. 

Porson, 439. 

Pope, 349. 

" Prince Charlie," 108. 

Prior, 298. 

Proserpine, 463. 

Prout. Father, 55. 

Psalms, 138, 396. 

Psyche, 25. 

Rabelais, 311. 
Raleigh, 227. 
Reformation, 145. 
Redbird, 201. 
Rhine, 15. 
Rhone, 22. 
Richard II., 446. 
Rockingham, Lord, 382. 
Rollin, 463. 
Rome, 54, 55. 



Rosebery, quoted, 213, 246. 
Rousseau, 25. 

Saintsbury, 435. 
Saul, 265. 
Scipio, 39. 

Second Sight, 133. 

Shakespeare, quoted, 27, 56, 58, 
Si, 181, 200, 278, 296, 327, 
328, 337, 340, 341, 348, 349, 
369, 373, 375, 380, 386, 388, 
393. 403. 404, 405, 425. 471- 

Shelley, quoted, 333, 334, 352, 
427, 503. 

Skye, 96, weather 113, heath 
114, Black Spring 114, 
beauty of ladies 117, lairds 
119. 

Smollett, Dr., 164. 

Socrates, 469 ct seq. 

Southey, 434. 

Spenser, 93, 107, 196, 289, 313, 
338, 35.1. 

Staffa, 157. 

Stars, 20. 

Storms-welcome, 109. 

St. Mark, 29, 31. 

Superstitions, 131. 

Symplegades, 60. 

Tacksman, 119. 
Tax, window, 149. 
Thackeray, 380. 
Thoreau, quoted, 134. 
Tasso, 32. 
Tennyson, 19, 56. 
Tiber, 47. 
Thrasimene, 41. 
Tradition, 110. 
Trajan, 50. 
Trees, 155. 

Ulysses, 107. 
Utopia, 311. 

Virgil, 297, 374, 399. 
Venice, 29, 30, 31, 32. 



5 i8 

Walton, 299. 

Washington, 48, 251, 252. 

War, 256. 

Warsaw, 229. 

Welsh, 140. 

Woodbury, 436. 



INDEX 



Wordsworth, sketch of, 501, 
quoted, 51, 163, 302, 421, 
426, 513. 

Xenophon, 467. 

Zisca, John, 360. 



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